I'm Anna Yeatts and welcome to Resonance: a surefire way to make me buy your story.
There's a feeling I get when I find the
right stories in the slush pile. It's
hard to explain but it's an intuitive
knowing that this is a well-told story.
You should know I'm an emotional reader.
I'm not the literary critic who will
stay up all night examining the themes
in your story.
What does the seagull represent? Hmm no. I'm the type of reader who can be
enchanted. I want to believe in the world
you're creating. I'm a closet romantic, a
secret dreamer beneath my sarcasm and sailors
vocabulary. But I also believe in
monsters. I also believe the worst
monsters are sometimes the ones that
live in the same house.  Wear the
skins of familiar faces and do
speakable things we'll never be able to
face except through the lens of fiction. Neil Gaiman spends a lot of
creative energy rethinking classic fairy
tales and ancient archetypes into his
fiction. He's very subtle at times but you feel
the call of the troll beneath the bridge,
the fallen star, the epic quest, the world
hidden just out of sight.
I've always loved his work especially
his short stories. For this very reason
Neil Gaiman is the king of resonance. So
what exactly is resonance? Have you ever
been near one of those giant church bells
when it's ringing? I'm talking the big
ones. The ones so large it takes a grown
man to ring. If you have you're nodding
along and you know where I'm going. You
could feel the vibrations all the way to
your bones. The pealing shakes you and
for that moment you're in tune with this
massive moving nonliving thing. It's a
rather out-of-control feeling because
even if you wanted to stop vibrating at
the same frequency as that monstrous bell I'm not sure you could. That is resonance.
Resonance is powerful. It's immediate and primal and out of your conscious control.
Jung and Freud tried to explain resonance
and its hold on the human psyche though
in other terms. But the bottom line is that
certain experiences strike us to our
core and shake us just like that bell.
We're moved whether we intend to be or
not. If you can harness the power of
resonance and use it in your stories, you
will sell like mad. Just look at Neil.
When you write a story about a woman
living on a spaceship fighting a
murderous alien
that's the context. No one on earth has
ever been through at least not to my
knowledge and without context it might
be hard to make the reader relate to
what this woman is going through because
aliens aren't real and there's no reason
to be scared. Right but once we overlay the story of a
woman fighting a murderous alien in
space with themes that resonate with a
multitude of readers like a mother-child
parallel between the woman and the alien
the woman's struggle with
femininity in a male-dominated
environment and the fear of dying alone
in space where no one can hear you scream, well
then we have Alien and it would be a
major blockbuster that appealed to both
men and women young and old and went on to spawn an entire series of sequels.
Ellen Ripley's character in Alien
resonates on some level with (and I'm
going out on a limb here) every fan of that movie. Who isn't afraid of dying alone?that's an
enormous resonance bell. If you can kick
that one readers will fall all over
themselves telling you how much they
relate to your story. Another example
let's go back to Neil Gaiman and one of
my all-time favorite books
Coraline. Coraline is technically a
children's book. Do I strike you as
someone who'd be so into children's
literature that I would name one as my
favorite? Yeah not so much.
So what is it about Coraline that
resonates with me? Coraline is full of
curiosity but it gets her into trouble
again and again. She's brave but frightened, longing for her parents, but fearful of
rejection. Looking for a better world but
missing the old. Akl in all it's a battle for
Coraline's soul. The voice is that of an
adult but it's all from Coraline point
of view. It's an easy point to miss. This
is how I as an adult can see myself in
Coraline. And in Coraline there's a
darkness that children feel but adults
understand. And it's on this precipice
that I believe the success of Coraline
lies. Evil resonates. Fear of the unknown
lives in all of us. Take also the Other
Mother as compared to the mothers in
fairy tales--
Snow White's evil queen, Rapunzel's witch, Hansel and Gretel's stepmother. See where I'm
going with this? There's an inherent
power either for good or evil in
motherhood. And all of us have mommy
issues of some size, shape, or form.
Motherhood resonates. Saving yourself by your wit resonates.
Active characters fighting through conflict resonate. You see where
I'm going? The list goes on and on. Here's
your homework. Think about your favorite
book or movie and then in the comments
tell me what it is about that story that
resonates with you.
 
