Drawing on the Power of Resonance in Writing

Comunicating Resonance to an Audience

When I worked in Hollywood, directors would often seek to have their works resonate with the monumental works in their field. They might say, "For this scene, I want a cool castle—sort of like Disney's palace, but not quite the same." They wanted the viewer to feel a connection, but not recognize that too consciously.

There are dozens of ways to create resonance. Let's go over just a few.

Cover art.

One of the first things that draws a reader into a story is the cover. If you pick up a romance novel, you want a picture that suggests romance—perhaps a man and woman hugging. If you want horror, something dark and sinister might be more apropos.

My own fantasy novels have covers by Darrell Sweet and look like other fantasy novels—with medieval characters on the cover, along with a few monsters. Sweet of course is famous for painting book covers for Terry Brooks and Robert Jordan, two of our best-sellers of all time.

So when readers look at my novels, they are immediately reminded of books by those authors. Now, do I write like either of them? Not much. I write epic fantasy in a medieval setting, but I don't have a lot of the Tokienesque trappings that Brooks and Jordan have. Still, readers who like the work of these bestselling authors are likely to pick up my books based upon the style of the cover art.

Once, I heard Darrell Sweet mention that one of his books, Ogre, Ogre, had outsold all others. So when writing my novel Wizardborn, I put in a scene that would resonate with a part of Ogre, Ogre. Sweet picked up on it and created the exact scene that I wanted—and the book quickly became a bestseller.

Story Title

Resonance in titles is so important, that at one time it was considered "a must" for a mainstream writer to try to find something that would resonate with a reader's wider experience. Titles taken from the bible were popular. Thus, Hemingway once read through the bible more than once looking for a title that bible readers would be familiar with. It wasn't until one of his friends, John Steinbeck, recommended the passage "the sun also rises upon the just and the unjust" that Hemingway found his title.

Some authors go to absurd lengths to find titles that resonate for readers. When I was young I loved the book The Swiss Family Robinson. But even at the age of twelve I had to wonder, "Why was a Swiss family named Robinson?"

Even as a child I knew that the appendage "son" is commonly used by Danes, not the Swiss. It wasn't until a few years later that I realized that the writer was trying to use resonance to draw upon another book about a famous castaway, Daniel Defoe's Robinson Crusoe, which is often regarded as the first novel in the English language. Reading it would have been a must for every English schoolboy in the 1800s. The name "Robinson" had resonance. In fact, when Wyss wrote the book in German, the family was not named Robinson. The title of the novel Der Schweizerische Robinson actually translates to "The Swiss Robinson," implying that it is a Swiss "Robinson Crusoe" story. English publishers later gave the family the surname Robinson in order to capitalize on the use of resonance.

Settings

Interestingly, one hallmark of a bestseller is that it must transport the reader to another time and place. If you look at the bestselling movies and books of all time, every one of them takes the audience someplace special.

But the audience must want to be transported to that place. You have to find a "where and when" that people would like to go. Most people, for example, wouldn't want to go to a prison ship in 1744. A story about a young slave falling in love on such a ship wouldn't do well. The setting is heartbreaking.

So readers prefer to be transported to "sexy" settings, as the legendary agent Albert Zuckerman puts it in Writing the Blockbuster Novel. Thus we have romance readers who may like to read books set only in Ireland, or during the Civil War, or on faraway planets.

So romance writers may do well if they set their novels in, say, historic England in 1800, but the same story set in North Carolina in that very same year, using characters with the very same names, and even the same incidents and descriptions would be a flop.

Motifs

Many times the resonance in a tale is based upon only a certain motif—the use of dragons or ghosts or zombies.

Similarly, we have plotting elements that are often resonant—wars, heists, escapes, hunts, and so on.

Characters

Sometimes a character in a story will resonate with others that we have known and loved. Authors may try to resonate with famous fictional characters, such as a plucky teen like Pollyanna, or a miser like Scrooge.

I have known authors who will populate their novels with movie stars in an effort to create some resonance. Thus, a detective named Daniel Stark may look and speak just like Jack Nicholson. Or maybe a baseball player might look like Tom Cruise. Fans who recognize what the author is doing really find it delightful, since they can more easily imagine the characters. So authors may try to resonate with famous actors.

A similar thing happens when I as a writer do a movie tie-in. With my Star Wars novels, many young readers wrote fan letters telling me how well I had brought the characters to life. It was easy to do—after watching the movies a couple of dozen times.

Series writers will often use the same character as a detective over and over. Thus, if you loved Sherlock Holmes in one novel, you may be eager to read about him in another. The same principle applies to some other powerful adventure characters—Tarzan, Conan, James Bond and many others. In short, a novel or a series of novels may have what we call "internal resonance," where parts of the story resonate with the writer's own past works.

However, some types of books don't adapt well to a series. With romances, once a couple falls in love, you can't really re-tell their love story successfully. Having them break up and then get back together isn't as fun as the original story.

Shared Experience

As I mentioned earlier, sometimes the resonance in a novel comes from experiences that the author and purchaser have in common. Authors are often told to "Write what you know." If you've worked in the military, you can probably write well enough about it so that it will resonate with others who have shared your experiences. If you've gone through a divorce, you can touch other readers more easily, and so on.

Nostalgic experiences can be almost magical. The movieA Christmas Story worked well becauseit played upon experiences that many of us have lived through. I rememberwanting a Red Ryder BB gun when I was a kid, and as a toddler, I had to wear acoat that would never let me put my arms down.    

Weaving it all Together

Most of the time, in any given paragraph, you as an author load your work with so much resonance, touch so many strings of human experience, that it becomes difficult to untangle them all.

You may be writing about a character similar to heroes from other novels and set the story in an England as viewed through your own experiences visiting five years ago. In writing about a war, you might draw upon conflicts found in famous battles and upon your own experience in losing a friend in a war. You might use language that feels appropriate to the time and place, seeking out imagery from a famous painting for inspiration.

The beauty of this is that you do it subconsciously. Yourreaders, of course, are almost always unaware of what you're doing, but youcreate a comfortable tale for your reader and create confidence in yourabilities as a writer, by resonating with the rest of literature and with lifein general.