More than Writers

A young girl enjoying her Elvish cosplay, image from Pixabay I recently reread The Lord of the Rings . What a pleasure it was to return to Middle-earth. Once again I was entranced by the timeless power of the story, the beauty of Tolkien’s language, his remarkable skill with dialogue, his wonderful characters and most of all his extraordinary world-building. Yet there is a missing element in that world-building – the complete absence of religion in Middle-earth (or more properly, Arda, since Middle-earth is in fact one continent and not the whole world). Fantasy writers often include detailed belief systems in their imaginary worlds, including CS Lewis, at one time a close friend of Tolkien’s and a keen supporter of Tolkien’s work (indeed, without Lewis nagging Tolkien to finish the book, The Lord of the Rings might never have seen the light of day.) The only time we ever see some kind of formal religion in Tolkien’s universe is during the Second Age, on the island kingdom of Núm...

Writers have a common denominator – we write. (At least, we hope so!) But the way we write, the hows and the whens, can vary greatly. There will be many of us who, on getting together, find ourselves in understanding company – where we keep saying, ‘Really? You too? That makes me feel so much better!’ But equally we can come across those who make us feel somewhat ‘lesser’, or a little bit odd, perhaps not a ‘proper’ writer because we don’t do things a certain way. Writer, know thyself. ( And by the way, thyself is allowed to be different from that lot over there.) One writer, chatting to me at the recent ACW writers’ day, expressed her anxiety over those who implied that there is a ‘best way of doing things’ – a ‘right way to write’, as it were – those who swear by writing a certain amount each day, keeping to a very specific routine. I said to her, as I have come to believe – we are all different; we all work in different ways; what releases one into productivity can impr...