Middle Earth: The Inside Story... Or is it more?

[Ibrîniðilpathânezel]

I myself do write, and some of what I write is fairly complex fiction somewhere between fantasy and science fiction. When I first began to conceive of a world of my own imaginative creation (well over 40 years ago), I know that I was heavily influenced by both Tolkien and Anne McCaffrey. My early attempts were quite abysmal, but as time went on and I and my writing matured, things improved. Part of the improvement I know I can gratefully acknowledge as having come from my relationship with my friend and mentor Katherine Kurtz (who penned the Chronicles of the Deryni). What is possibly the most valuable piece of advice she gave me was that when an author creates a "new world," they must know that world in as exacting a detail as possible. What shows up in the actual books may be only a comparative tip of the iceberg, but if you don't know all there is to know about the world you are inventing, your lack of knowledge will be picked up by the readers, usually as inconsistencies, contradictions, or illogical events or behaviors. I found she's quite right. And because of that, an author does tend to get drawn into the world they are inventing. It is an immensely complex work of art, and as you develop one part of it, other parts suggest themselves; backstory grows and becomes more intricate as events of the present and future are mapped out. When you determine that a certain character is to do something, you wonder about their motivation, and in determining their motivation, you begin to build their past history, which grows into a family tree, with other people who came from other places and did things in their own rights. As cities are imagined, the societies that inhabit them is created, and given histories of their own. The process of imagining one thing pulls you into imagining another, and another, and another.

Tolkien, I think, rather neatly summed up much of the process early in LotR:

"Certainly it reminds me very much of Bilbo in the last years, before he went away. He used to often say that there was only one Road; that it was like a great river: its springs were at every doorstep, and every path was its tributary. 'It's a dangerous business, Frodo, going out of your door,' he used to say. 'You step into the Road, and if you don't keep your feet, there is no knowing where you might be swept off to."

That, in my experience, is very much like the process of inventing your own world, in which your characters live and have adventures. It draws you in, and quite often, it sweeps you along in the current of your own imagination unleashed. It's often a difficult process, but it can be exhilarating as well.

Just my experience, of course.

[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

That said, I think any author of fiction who is at least tolerably good at it, must fall into the world of their story and believe in it themselves; otherwise, how could we readers take it seriously?

Well, you will wonder, but I think some don't. Or, in any case, not in the "Tolkienish" sense - of being in there - sometimes the writing can be detached, "programmed", especially if the author wants to put in some message, which is more important for him than the requisites of the story.

Personally, I don't feel any more 'drawn' into Tolkien's books than I do for the works of other authors. For me, when reading a book I like, the suspension of disbelief and sense of being there are equal, whether I'm reading The Silmarillion, Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot, or Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study In Scarlet. Tolkien's books are especially dear to me though because I do love the world, the characters, and in particular the incomparably exquisite and powerful liguistic style.

Hmm, as for me, it certainly is not the same with every book. Some are just badly written and you do not get into it as much anyway. And with some it really works, I recall this one book where a character was in the desert, for whole one chapter, thirsty, trying to find a way out, and I really was just sitting there, reading the book and sharing it, I could not get up from it, even though I felt unbelievably thirsty as well. Something similar happened to me, in fact, with Frodo and Sam in Mordor. But some books just pull you into the world strongly, some don't as much.

Originally Posted by Ibrîniðilpathânezel

When you determine that a certain character is to do something, you wonder about their motivation, and in determining their motivation, you begin to build their past history, which grows into a family tree, with other people who came from other places and did things in their own rights. As cities are imagined, the societies that inhabit them is created, and given histories of their own. The process of imagining one thing pulls you into imagining another, and another, and another.

Tolkien, I think, rather neatly summed up much of the process early in LotR:

That, in my experience, is very much like the process of inventing your own world, in which your characters live and have adventures. It draws you in, and quite often, it sweeps you along in the current of your own imagination unleashed. It's often a difficult process, but it can be exhilarating as well.

Yes, well, I have similar experience, but rather from my creating the RPG scenarios and worlds, where it is more like "mechanical", though: I simply have to know where this character came from, to determine what is he going to act like when he meets the player characters, and to know what was his life like up to now, I have to make up more of his home country, and when I am doing it, I have to know who is the ruler of it etc. But it is not always that I would be necessarily interested in it the way I understand it with Tolkien. This was really a necessity: more like a mechanical process, indeed.

But from my personal experience also, another thing is when I am "just writing", and I don't have any particular intention to "explore the world" - I just have the inspiration and, rather, I watch the story unfold in front of me, as it goes, not knowing what comes next, but I am an observer, dragged into the story, but I do not have any intentions of my own. I do not want to know what happens next. I don't think about it. It just happens. That is something Tolkien wrote about as well, I think. But of course not that it would happen all the time.

The third situation would be what Tolkien says - this exploring, and at least for me this is extremely rare. Simply a sort of conscious working on the process (like in the first case I mentioned), but at the same time, being dragged into the story actively, being "inside it", as Sam Gamgee would say (like in the second case). This is when I am actually there on the plains of Rohan or wherever and decide, yes, there are these mountains one can see on the horizon - I wonder what is there? And you go there (intentional activity) and find something there (unintentional activity, like in the second case). This is what I understand under Tolkien's journeys to Faërie. But like I say, at least for me, it is extremely rare to get into that mood - to enter the true realm of Faërie in the first place, so to say.