Drawing on the Power of Resonance in Writing Read Free Page A

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 , “W hy 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. R eading 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 lik e 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 other s . In short, a novel or a