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Ideas That Work: Resonant Ideas By Ethan Chatagnier
by Writing Workshops Org Admin
A year ago
What if blindness was contagious? What if everyone rode unicycles instead of bicycles? What if snow glowed in the dark? What if humans became unable to conceive children?
Most great ideas start with a “what if?”--but not all what-ifs are equal. Two of the ideas above are resonant, evocative. Two are not. Unicycle-world is quirky. There’s some magic to a world where snow glows. But neither is likely to strum a sympathetic chord within us. Neither is it tied to larger concerns and themes.
That’s what resonance is: the prolonging of a sound, the stretching of it. The way one frequency is tied to another.
Contagious blindness, the premise behind Nobel Prize winner Jose Saramago’s Blindness, is connected to disaster and illness, to the idea of contagion, and the various metaphorical meanings of blindness.
The end of human conception resonates as well. Connected ideas: survival, fragility, sterility. Bonding and lack of bonding. Hope, or the end of it. Life and self-preservation. (This idea formed the basis for the book The Children of Men and its film adaptation).
Resonant ideas are a writer’s lifeblood. Always be on the lookout for them.
Five years ago, I listened to an interview with a pianist about playing music designed to be nearly impossible to play. I immediately thought “What if someone wrote music designed to actually be impossible to play?” Impossibility. Challenge. Composing. Performing. The difficulties and impossibilities of living any life.
It would be three years before I found the right form for that story, but it was on my mind the whole time. The idea hummed against other ideas.
When an idea does that, it means there is a story to be written.
Join Ethan for his upcoming class, Idea Mining: A 4-Week Generative Fiction Workshop.
