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…
Seven
I inherited my love of reading from one of my older brothers, and naturally – like a lot of boys – gravitated to the allure of fantasy. Reading The Lord of the Rings as a 12-year-old was as close to a divine experience as I’d ever had. It wasn’t just the story, although there’s enough in that to inspire awe and wonder. But what overwhelmed me more was the history this world contained – a history that spanned millennia and was imbued in every bit of geography, motivated every character, and contextualized every event. One of my issues with storytelling is when it feels like the story, or the world…