Drawing on the Power of Resonance in Writing

Contents

Introduction
             
3

Three Types of Resonance
             
10

Communicating Resonance to an Audience
             
12

A Case Study in Using Resonance: Tolkien
             
16

Echoing Other Works:
Der Ring des Nibelung
and
The Lord of the Rings
             
18

Resonance with Names
             
20

Resonating with Other Works
             
24

Resonating with Universal Experiences
             
29

Internal Resonance
             
31

Language in
The Lord of the Rings
             
35

In Conclusion
             
41

Resonance within a Genre
             
42

Resonance Outside of Tolkien
             
46

Resonance and You
             
47

Where Resonance Goes Wrong
             
48

In Conclusion
             
50

Ways to Draw Upon Resonance
             
51

Drawing
on the Power of Resonance in Writing

A few years ago, I was asked to speak at a writing conference.
The conference had been running for twenty years, and the administrator
said
, “We’ve covered just about
every topic that I can think of
over the p
ast twenty years. Is there anything
that you can think
of
that we haven’t
discussed
?”

Immediately I suggested, “Well, of course one of the most important
skills
for a writer to master i
s the proper use of resonance.
”

The administrator was taken aback
and asked,
“What is resonance?”

Then it struck me.
I had
never
heard any writer discuss
resonance in writing
at any conference.
I’d never read a book or article on the topic. I’d never had one of my writing instructors discuss it. As far as I could tell, they were completely in the dark.

Instead of learning about resonance in one grand discourse, I picked up on the topic in bits and pieces. I’d read a brief mention about it in an article written by a master editor. An agent once spoke about it directly. I overheard a
New York Times
bestselling author try to explain the concept to
a new writer, and T.S. Eliot touched upon it as he struggled to write works that were woven into the tapestry of literature as a whole. 
Mostly I had learned about it in Hollywood while working with directors.

But I’ve never heard novelists or writing instructors even mention the topic.

W
hen I went to
that writing
conference
years ago
, perhaps forty writers attended my class
. Many of them
had studied the craft for decades. So
I asked, “
H
ow many of you know what resonance is?”
I was met by blank stares.
Only one author had even heard the term, and she couldn’t tell me what it meant.

All successful writers use res
onance to enhance their stories
by drawing power from stories that came before, b
y resonating with their readers’
experiences, and by resonating within their own works.

In this book, you’
ll learn exactly what resonance is and how to use it to make your stories more powerful.  You'll see how it is used in literature and other art forms, and how one writer, J. R. R. Tolkien, mastered it in his work.

In the field of music, a musical refrain is said to “resonate” when it “draws power by repeating that which has come before.”
Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony is a masterpiece of resonance, and it is so well known that you may be able to listen to it in your head from memory:

Da, da, da,
dum
.

Da, da, da,
dum
. . . .

In case you can’t play it in your head, here is a
link
to the symp
hony.

As you listen to the symphony, you’ll hear how Beethoven starts with a simple theme, repeating the same four notes twice, and then he has a change-up and expands upon that theme. He does this dozens of times, coming up with variation after variation, eventually seeming to abandon the theme altogether.

Indeed, a few minutes into the symphony there is a shocking moment where we realize that we have come full circle. Beethoven returns to the original theme, playing louder and more boldly than before. In music, when a refrain gains power by repeating something that has gone before, we say that it
resonates
.

But the same thing happens in literature. We feel powerful emotions when we read a book that somehow resembles other works that we love. For example, you may read a new author and discover that the author’s world is similar to one that you’ve visited in literature and loved before. If you’re a fan of the pirating world in
Treasure Island,
you might find that you really like Tim
Powers’s
On Stranger Tides.
You’ll almost instantly feel a great affinity for Tim’s work.

In a similar way, a tale may also resonate when it evokes powerful emotions by drawing upon the reader’s own past experience. For example, a woman who has been divorced may read a passage in a novel and realize, “Wow, this author has really been through it, too. We really do have a lot in common.”

There are literally hundreds of ways to create resonance—through voice, tone, characterization, imagery, setting, or simply by referring to popular works, by bringing common experiences to life, and so on.

To the reader, a story that resonates powerfully may seem
especially
significant or rich—much more so than a tale that doesn’t resonate.

Readers often become fans of a
genre
after discovering one defining work in that genre
.
When I was a teen, I read Tolkien’s
The Lord of the Rings.
I enjoyed the book so much that I began looking for similar titles. At the time, there was no such thing as a “fantasy genre,” but I hungered for
books  like
Lord of the Rings.
I wanted to recreate the experience of reading it. So I tried Ursula K.
LeGuin’s
The Wizard of
Earthsea
,
Patricia
McKillip’s
The
Riddlemaster
of
Hed
,
and Fritz
Leiber’s
Fafhrd
and the Gray Mouser,
among hundreds of other works.

Eventually, when I ran out of fantasy novels to read, I began to write my own.
A Wizard in
Halflight
,
one of my first tales, which I started writing at the age of 17, told the exploits of a young boy going to a high school to study wizardry.

Each time that I read a good fantasy, I found some new little nugget in the fantasy genre that seemed delicious to me. By doing so, I gained a deeper and broader appreciation for the genre as a whole.

You’re much the same. Whatever your favorite genre is, you can probably trace your love for it back to one single book that really moved you.

Many people became vampire fans as children by watching old horror movies. Later they expanded upon this by reading Anne Rice. You may have loved Buffy the Vampire Slayer. When
Stephenie
Meyer came out with
Twilight,
she played upon the works that preceded her, but she also expanded upon the genre in such a way that she brought in an entire new generation of readers. With that, vampire fiction took off to unprecedented heights in popularity, and suddenly we had a piece of
Twilight
fan fiction,
50 Shades of Gre
y
, become a hit.

Do you see how the genre grows in leaps from a base of fans? Each succeeding work is like a mushroom, rising up from the remains of what grew before.

So readers of romance might begin in high school by reading Emily
Bront
ë
’s
Wuthering Heights,
go on to
Jane Eyre,
and begin developing a taste for romance. Very often, readers of romance will fall in love with books set in a particular historical period—the Regency Romances—where the genre began, but then will move on to more modern eras.

Historically, we’ve seen a number of genres develop due to one great work. Thus, you can look at something like the success of the film
Pirates of the Caribbean
and trace the genre back in time first to the rides at Disneyland in the 1960s, and from there on back to pirate books and movies of the past—from the films of Errol Flynn in the 1920s, to Robert Louis Stevenson’s hit
Treasure Island
in 1883
,
from there to
Swiss Family Robinson
in 1812
,
and from there to
Robinson Crusoe
,
first published in 1718. Each of these bestsellers resonated with huge hits from the past, and thus built up a larger fan base.

So readers are often searching for something that moves them in a familiar way.