Drawing on the Power of Resonance in Writing

3 Types of Resonance:

Resonance within a Genre

When you read a book that affects you powerfully, you'll be likely to buy a story that reminds you of it. This is true regardless of whether the story be Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, Austen's Pride and Prejudice, Shakespeare's Macbeth, or Dickens's A Christmas Carol.

Most books that you buy resonate with some other work that you've enjoyed. You almost never make a conscious connection, but it is there. You tend to choose books that suit your developing tastes.

Resonance with Life

However, you should also be aware that we buy books that resonate with our own lives. For example, readers subconsciously gravitate to characters who are about their own age and sex. Thus, young women tend to like stories about young women, while young men like stories about teenage boys.

You can also resonate within a setting. If you set a story about a detective in a major city—let's say New York—you will find that people from that city are much more likely to buy your book. They feel a personal connection to the work that outsiders don't.

Entire cultures resonate. Recently I went to a large international book fair in Frankfurt, Germany, where thousands of publishers from around the world congregated. In many countries, I found that books from Western cultures simply "didn't translate." Want to know how well Twilight has done in Oman, or the Ukraine, or Indonesia? The chances are that it hasn't been translated at all. The entire lifestyle is so alien to people in those countries, that most of our literature just doesn't translate easily.

But there are other ways to resonate with life besides just the age of the protagonist or by choosing the setting. Years ago, I was asked by the chief editor at Scholastic to help choose the "next big book" for the year, the one that they would put all of their advertising muscle behind. I chose an unknown book called Harry Potter. The editor said that her marketing department didn't share my enthusiasm for the book: it was too long for a middle-grade audience. But I pointed out that it had several things going for it. One powerful draw was that every child in most of the world has to go to school. Adults feel that universal conflicts revolve around death, taxes, and love. But for children, the universals are bullies, inscrutable teachers, and being chained to a desk.

In short, almost every child in the world would find that Harry's experiences at Hogwarts resonated with their own life.

Resonance with Emotional Needs

We often choose the genre of fiction that we do because we are seeking to create a positive emotional experience.

The primary emotional draw of a book is so powerful that bookstores and libraries tend to arrange their shelves according to the emotion that the book arouses. Stores typically have shelves for "Romance," "Drama," "Mystery," "Horror," "Adventure," "Humor" and so on.

We could do a better job of arranging the books if we carried the practice further. One wise editor in the 1950s struggled to get fantasy and science fiction categorized as "wonder" literature in bookstores and libraries, since both genres promise to fulfill the same emotional need of wonder for readers.