Drawing on the Power of Resonance in Writing by David Farland Page B

dream, and she was able to jump into the project at just the right time . She created a work that resonated with many other things—the works of Anne Rice, the television series Buffy the Vampire Slayer, and of course it resonated with Stephenie’s own life and the experiences of any teen who goes to a new school.
     
    So dig deep into your own personal experiences, but also learn to tap into cultural phenomenon—into myths, religion, global politics, major motion pictures and books, and even internet memes in order to establish resonance.   Draw from the whole of your life, and from the rest of the world. 

Where Resonance Goes Wrong
     
    You can’t get rid of resonance. Your personal tastes are going to be influenced by the stories that you’ve loved the most . So don’t ever try to be “completely” original . It’s a good way to go mad.
     
    I’m reminded of Larry Niven . A critic once talked to him about his bestselling novel Ringworld , pointing out that it had strong ties in its plot line to The Wizard of Oz. Larry, who is a genius by any standard, was floored. He said, “I suddenly realized that I had read The Wizard of Oz hundreds of times as a child. I loved it. Of course, I couldn’t help the fact that it helped form my fiction.”
     
    Because Niven was drawing upon a popular source for inspiration, it probably helped him to find a large audience.
     
    But let’s say that he hadn’t. What if, as a child, Larry Niven had fallen in love with a terribly obscure tale. Let’s make up one. We’ll call it “How Pollywog Lost his Tail.” It’s the story of a pollywog in a tiny pond. Day by day, the fierce sun beats down upon it, shrinking the pond. As he goes about feeding, he worries that he is going to die, and his tail shrinks. Yet as it shrinks, he finds that he begins to grow new hands and legs. Eventually, the pond dries up, and as the pollywog begins to die, his tail shrinks completely. The pollywog turns into a full-fledged frog, and uses his newfound powers to hop away.
     
    I nstead of writing Ringworld , let’s say that Niven wrote a story about a young lizard man in a city. As city violence escalates, lizard-boy finds that his tail begins shrinking. Eventually, lizard-boy is on the verge of losing his life, when suddenly his “death fangs” grow in, and he gains super powers.
     
    Would the second tale resonate with a larger audience? Not at all. I’m not aware of any place in literature where humans celebrate the loss of body parts as they metamorph into adult creatures. So there hasn’t traditionally been an audience for this, and the new novel most likely would never find an audience.
     
    In other words, you can also go wrong by drawing upon obscure sources for your resonance. If you don’t develop mainstream tastes at any time of your life, it’s not likely that you’ll attract a mainstream audience.
     
    This doesn’t mean that you can’t have a career as an author . It just means that you’ll need to try to use your novelty and perhaps your own unique writing skills to create an audience.
     
    A similar thing happens if you don’t draw upon common cultural experiences in order to resonate with life. If your life was a novel—if you were raised by lions in Africa—you’re not going to be able to draw upon family life, school, and so on in order to create a bond between you and your audience.
     
    Have you ever noticed that very young authors, regardless of talent, can almost never connect to a vast audience? They haven’t lived enough, experienced enough, to do so. Given this, they almost always find that they connect with audiences that they do have something in co mmon with—very young audiences.

In Conclusion
     
    We have a vast reservoir of shared experience that helps us as people bond together.
     
    Some of that shared experience can be found in literature, in film, in movies, or in art. Other shared experiences come from our schooling, our workplace, our