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A review by wandering_not_lost
Drawing on the Power of Resonance in Writing by David Farland
1.0
Got this book through StoryBundle, and I'm glad I didn't pay more for it. The book's advice struck me as self-evident and the author's voice pretentious right from the start. The author describes how he flabbergasted a group of writers when he said that "resonance" is the most important thing in writing and they didn't know what he meant. The reason they didn't know what he meant is that no one else uses "resonance" the way he used it. If he'd said "you need to give your readers something familiar enough to hook them but novel enough to be interesting", they would have gone "well, of course."
That was my feeling through most of this book: well, of course. The author spends all of the book going through example after example of ways that you can make your writing familiar to the reader by calling back to famous works, to universal life experiences, and to genre-specific vocabulary that your readers will expect. The main point is that you want to have many points of similarity between your work and other works or events that your reader is likely to have experienced. The author goes on for many pages about how Tolkien does this in his work. The author states several times, "and authors often do this subconsciously!" Well,...of course they do! We live in a world where we ourselves are influenced by fiction, movies, art, and societal culture! ANYTHING WE DO NECESSARILY CALLS BACK TO OUR EXPERIENCES. It left me feeling like the author was telling everyone to do something they'd do anyway.
And my main beef with the book is that the author is telling people to do many things that it's very easy to do WRONG. In fact, I'd argue that most books DO NOT NEED more resonance than the authors would likely put in out of the box. If anything, they need LESS. It's easy to be SO SIMILAR to other things that your work does not offer anything new or original to drown out the hundred pages of Yet Another Hero arriving at (usually his) school and making Two Good Friends and One Horrible Enemy. I haven't read any of the author's work, so I don't know if he falls into the trap of writing things that I would label "more of the same, yawn", but he didn't give the reader any pointers about how to be original while still using familiar elements. I felt the book needed a "How Not to Sound Like Everyone Else" chapter rather desperately, and the fact that the author didn't think one necessary made me leery.
I get the feeling the author's view of a good story is different than mine. In fact, the dissonance between what I want to read and what he wanted people to write was so high that when he was giving examples of plots that he insisted would just NOT work, because they're too Out There...I actually thought those plots sounded pretty neat and interesting. Why? Because I'm tired of reading the same Hero's Journey with the same handful of archetypes in the Hero Seat over and over again. And that was what the author was telling the reader to emulate. Yawn.
That was my feeling through most of this book: well, of course. The author spends all of the book going through example after example of ways that you can make your writing familiar to the reader by calling back to famous works, to universal life experiences, and to genre-specific vocabulary that your readers will expect. The main point is that you want to have many points of similarity between your work and other works or events that your reader is likely to have experienced. The author goes on for many pages about how Tolkien does this in his work. The author states several times, "and authors often do this subconsciously!" Well,...of course they do! We live in a world where we ourselves are influenced by fiction, movies, art, and societal culture! ANYTHING WE DO NECESSARILY CALLS BACK TO OUR EXPERIENCES. It left me feeling like the author was telling everyone to do something they'd do anyway.
And my main beef with the book is that the author is telling people to do many things that it's very easy to do WRONG. In fact, I'd argue that most books DO NOT NEED more resonance than the authors would likely put in out of the box. If anything, they need LESS. It's easy to be SO SIMILAR to other things that your work does not offer anything new or original to drown out the hundred pages of Yet Another Hero arriving at (usually his) school and making Two Good Friends and One Horrible Enemy. I haven't read any of the author's work, so I don't know if he falls into the trap of writing things that I would label "more of the same, yawn", but he didn't give the reader any pointers about how to be original while still using familiar elements. I felt the book needed a "How Not to Sound Like Everyone Else" chapter rather desperately, and the fact that the author didn't think one necessary made me leery.
I get the feeling the author's view of a good story is different than mine. In fact, the dissonance between what I want to read and what he wanted people to write was so high that when he was giving examples of plots that he insisted would just NOT work, because they're too Out There...I actually thought those plots sounded pretty neat and interesting. Why? Because I'm tired of reading the same Hero's Journey with the same handful of archetypes in the Hero Seat over and over again. And that was what the author was telling the reader to emulate. Yawn.