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

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.
    As they grow more sophisticated in their tastes, widening their interests, the reader begins to look for something a little different. In other words, they want something similar—but better.
     
    Thus, a reader of Westerns may say, “I’m tired of Zane Grey. I wonder what new authors are out there?” And he may discover Larry McMurtry’s Lonesome Dove.
     
    Readers crave something different, but not completely different.
     
    As writers, we find that entire “genres” or “sub-genres” grow up around great novels. As new genres develop, over the centuries, hundreds of different types of code words, phrases, settings, and standard character types