Drawing on the Power of Resonance in Writing (9 page)

So the question in my mind
is,
just how many people buy books because they resonate with other works, and how many actually buy for novelty?

Take a look at the fantasy and science fiction market. The fantasy market is much larger than the science fiction market. I can’t say how much larger for sure, but years ago I was told by industry professionals that fantasy appeared to be outselling science fiction by about six to one. In the years since, science fiction sales have dropped dramatically. I suspect that fantasy outsells science fiction by
more than ten to one.

But forty years ago there was no “fantasy” market. There was no section in the bookstores that said “fantasy” anywhere. Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings
became something of a cult hit in the 1960s and grew into the 1970s. It wasn’t until 1977, when Terry Brooks came out with
The Sword of
Shannara
that a fantasy novel hit
The Ne
w York Times
Bestseller list, and Brooks stayed on top of the list for five months. That is when fantasy as a “genre” was born.

Sure, there had been fantasy novels before. Robert E. Howard’s Conan stories began appearing in the early 1930s, along with the work of Fritz
Lieber
and others, and these surely had an influence on Tolkien. But most of those early works were printed in magazines, and there were not sections yet devoted to the “fantasy” genre.

But once Terry Brooks hit the big time, publishers began to respond to a perceived demand for fantasy.

Of course a lot of things got shelved with the fantasy, but the most commercially successful works were those that best imitated Tolkien. These are usually stories set in 1) a medieval setting, 2) with a small cast of people traveling on a quest, 3) in a world populated by several species of intelligent humanoids, including wizards, and so on.

Examples of this include works by Brooks, Jordan, Weiss and Hickman, etc.—who have been, by the way, the most commercially successful writers in the fantasy genre until just recently.

One quote, from
The New York Times
, on Robert Jordan’s novels says “
Jordan has come to dominate the world Tolkien began to reveal.”
And that is true. Of the fantasy writers of the past 15 years,
Jordan
has been most successful, selling literally millions of copies. But if you look closely at the first hundred pages of
Eye of the World
, you will see dozens (even hundreds, if you want to get nit-picky) of parallels between Jordan’s work and Tolkien’s.

The parallels start when you open the book. Before each story begins, we see a map. Tolkien’s map shows his world, Middle-earth, “at the end of the third age.” Jordan’s novel has a map with a strikingly similar coast
line,
and at the end of Jordan’s brief and powerful prologue, we see that he quotes historians from “the Fourth Age.” There are other similarities in the maps. Tolkien has his
Mount
Doom
, while
Jordan
has his Mountains of
Dhoom
.
Tolkien talks of his Misty Mountains, Jordan has
(on his second map) the Mountains of Mist.

In both novels, we begin with a celebration. In
The Lord of the Rings
, Tolkien’s Hobbits plan to celebrate a birthday party. Jordan’s characters plan to celebrate
Bel
Tine.

In
The Lord of the Rings
, the wizard Gandalf plans to make an unusual appearance and sets off fireworks. In Jordan’s novel, wizards make an unusual appearance in town and thus add to the spectacle of the planned fireworks.

In
The Lord of the Rings
, our hero is a young man, a rustic gentleman farmer, who barely escapes his home with three companions when the Dark Riders begin their hunt. With
Jordan
, our hero is a young man, a poor farmer, who barely escapes his home with three companions when
trollocs
attack. (Note that in Tolkien’s world we have trolls, in Jordan’s we have
trollocs
.)

Now, I could go on for pages like this, dissecting sentences to show how
Jordan
is establishing resonance with Tolkien, Howard, Arthurian legend, and so on. Yet I feel like I’ve done enough of that. Rather, I’d like to get to the point of what I’m trying to say: Robert Jordan is a very fine and powerful writer in his own right. He could have created his own fantasy world, populated it with creatures
from
his own
imagination
, and given us something new. But he recognized that there was a vast audience out there who was still looking for something that resonated deeply with Tolkien’s work, and he made the choice to capture that existing audience rather than write in the hope that he might gather his own fans independently.

The truth is that if you write something startlingly original, it is very difficult to sell. Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings
went to dozens of publishers before it found a home, yet now if you look at most polls by fantasy
readers,
it is considered the greatest fantasy of all time.

Similarly, in science fiction, the novel
Dune
is now considered by most readers to be the best Science Fiction novel ever written—but Frank Herbert went through every publisher in New York before a magazine company decided to give it a shot.

If you try to create and sell a truly original fantasy, publishers won’t know what to do with it. So let’s say you write about creatures that you call “
Golunds
.” Your protagonist has three legs and two heads. He lives in a land called
Neuropa
, and his great conflict is that he hopes to find love in a land where all solicitations for affection are outlawed. You send your masterpiece into a publisher and manage to hook an editor. They love it. “What shelf should we put it on?” they’ll ask. “How do we market it? What other bestseller is it most like?” If you answer, “It’s totally different!” they will not be happy. I
n
fact, it will never make it past the marketing board.

So as a writer, you need to consider, “What other works will my book resonate with?”

One way to do this is to aim a book right down the reader’s throat. Look at the age of your target audience, and ask yourself, “What works have most influenced
my audience?”

Let’s say you’re writing to a young teen audience. You might decide that the huge blockbuster movies of the past decade have been
Harry Potter
;
The Lion, the Witch, and the Wardrobe
;
Pirates of the Caribbean
;
Shrek
;
Spiderman
, and so on. You can then look at television—
Heroes
,
Buffy
,
Spongebob
. You might go on to consider videogames, popular music, and the effect that the twin towers has had on the life of a person growing up today.

In short, as you write, you need to be aware of what your reader has probably been influenced by, and then consider whether or not you want to change what you’d like to write in order to better reach a large potential audience.

It may sound as if I’ve been pretty exhaustive in my dissecting of Tolkien, but I’ve hardly touched the surface.

Masters at the use of resonance make it a life study.

If you take any major motion picture and study it closely, you will most likely see how it resonates.

For example, if you watch the movie
Avatar
, you can see plot devices that make it feel like
Dances with Wolves
meets
Fern Gully
. Portions of the plot seem to be drawn from
a short story by
Poul
Anderson
.
Images from the film echo other science fiction movies—from
Alien
, to
Star Trek
, to
2001: A Space Odyssey
, and so on
.
A couple of characters created for the movie look suspiciously similar to char
acters from popular videogames
.
Lines
from
Avatar
draw from President George Bush and from the movie the
Terminator
.

If we studied the music, dialog, plotline, ship design, clothing design, and imagery frame-by-frame, we could see how this film ties into dozens of other major franchises.

Was any of it by accident? No. The best writers and directors are painfully conscious about the works that they’re struggling to resonate with. They’re aware that every piece of literature is part of a greater field of art, and that artists communicate to the world across the generations by joining that conversation.

Recently, I showed some of my students the animated Disney film
Tangled
, and we studied how animators had made it resonate with dozens of other films, many within Disney’s own franchises. In some ways, animated films—which one might imagine would be the simplest forms of entertainment—can become more complex and self-conscious than works in just about any medium.

At this point some readers may feel like I’m telling them all to write like Tolkien, to master the use of resonance down to the level of the
ceneme
. In actuality, I don’t think you need to try to write just like Tolkien—or anyone else.

The truth is that when we try to “create” stories, generally we are simply combining rather common elements. In other words, your story will draw upon the power of resonance whether you mean for it to or not. You’ll combine elements that you love from other arts, from other works, and other lives in order to create something extraordinary.

For this reason, I sometimes suggest that authors try to “marry” uncommon elements
.
Years ago, one of my young students,
Stephenie
Meyer, asked “How do I become the bestselling young adult writer of all time.”  So we began discussing what her story would be about—a tale that brought together a sense of wonder and romance
.
As she talked, she sparked ideas on where she
might
go with this, speaking about her home in Forks, Washington and vampires in the woods
.
I recall it vividly because I had lived in such a forest in Oregon about ten years earlier, and I realized that, “Yes, it would be a perfect place for vampires.” 
Her ideas seemed to be vague still, unformed.
I warned her that it might be hard to sell
such a novel
at that time
.
Major publishers didn’t have any lines for
contemporary
teen fantasy
, and even though a romance made sense from a
greenlighting
aspect, publishers who’d never printed such books might not back it
, but I suspected that with the rise of Harry Potter’s popularity, the major publishers might be looking for something like
Stephenie’s
books
in a few years.

Like many authors,
Stephenie’s
world came together in a vivid dream, and she was able to jump into the project at just the right time
.
She created a work that resonated with many other things—the works of Anne Rice, the television series
Buffy the Vampire Slayer,
and of course it resonated with
Stephenie’s
own life and the experiences of any teen who goes to a new school.

So dig deep into your own personal experiences, but also learn to tap into cultural
phenomenon—into
myths, religion, global politics, major motion pictures and books, and even internet memes in order to establish resonance.
  Draw from the whole of your life, and from the rest of the world. 

You can’t get rid of resonance. Your personal tastes are going to be influenced by the stories that you’ve loved the most
.
So don’t ever try to be “completely” original
.
It’s a good way to go mad.