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…
My Roots in Fantasy
I first read JRR Tolkien’s The Hobbit in 1982 or so, and then The Lord of the Rings later that same year. The books speak of grand adventure, nobility, overwhelming evil, the hero’s journey (and, in these cases, the heroes are raging underdogs), and sacrifice, amongst many other things.. I have no idea why swords and medieval adventure appealed to me as a kid. Maybe it’s because of that grand adventure. But Tolkien’s work was brilliant not only for its scope, but the depth of its history. Here was a fully formed universe. Everywhere the characters went had history. The roots tracked back long before these particular stories began. I…