Drawing on the Power of Resonance in Writing

Resonance Within A Genre

Earlier I discussed how authors use resonance within a genre. For many pages now, I've been discussing Tolkien. I recall as a teen feeling that his works were unique and original, yet somehow haunting. I wasn't familiar then with many of the precursors to Tolkien's works.

It may not be obvious to a new writer, but resonance is the single greatest draw that you can try to invest into your work. When most people choose to buy a book or go to a movie, it is because it resonates with things that they have seen and enjoyed before.

A couple of years ago, I went out to sell books at the fair. I had dozens of books on display, and some of them have been around for years, but this was the first time that I'd ever been able to sit in front of buyers and get their reactions to the books. Frequently I had teens grab a Runelords book and say, "Oh, this is what dad likes." Sometimes they even knew which book he'd read, but many of them would then look at the books a bit confusedly and then say, "Oh, no, this just looks like them." Invariably the dad was either a reader of Terry Brooks or Robert Jordan, and the teen had simply recognized the style of the cover art. Yet in most cases, after realizing that I wasn't Brooks or Jordan, the wife would pick up one of my books anyway. Why? Resonance. My book looked like the kind that her husband might like.

In other cases, moms would grab book five in the series and say, "Has Jaden read this one yet?" The book pictures a young man on a graak, a dragon-like creature; it turns out that there are a lot of Jadens out there who only like to read books about dragons. Once again, resonance.

If you ask a person who describes himself as a "big science fiction and fantasy fan" what he likes to read, you will almost always find that his tastes are rather narrow. They'll tell you, "I like J.K. Rowling" or "I love Orson Scott Card." In short, they have a favorite author in the genre but haven't read beyond that author. Or maybe they've read widely in a certain franchise—Dragonlance or Star Wars. Resonance.

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 New 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. In 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.