Why Write
Why do I write? That’s something the psychiatrist asked. And I was stumped. There’s a love of world-building – like JRR Tolkien, creating Middle-Earth, replete with its races, their languages, their dwellings, the history and how everything had come to be, Sauron and the One Ring, and the way the little people, the Hobbits, could play such an instrumental part in the greatest conflict of them all. I enjoyed that – building something where nothing had previously existed, knowing that I breathed life into these characters, that I painstakingly constructed the world they inhabited, that I devised their rules of magic and law and society, that I could set characters…
A Look Back: The Lord of the Rings
I grew up reading JRR Tolkien. I read The Hobbit (1937) in 1982 (and played the adventure game for the home computer). That summer break, I read The Lord of the Rings – The Fellowship of the Ring (1954), The Two Towers (1954), and The Return of the King (1955). I fell in love with Middle-earth and high fantasy to the extent that I then read all the supporting material that came out, such as The Silmarillion, Unfinished Tales, The Book of Lost Tales, etc. Tolkien’s Middle-earth opened up a world of magic, heroic quests, and history that delved into the beginning of time. It also taught me the importance…