Being a Tolkien fan is all about the reading experience

It occurred to me the other day that I could probably be classified as a bit of a Tolkien fan. I’ve been soaking up Tolkien’s books ever since I was about 10.

I had to pose in the entrance of the 2012 Hobbit Artisan Market in Wellington …but that’s the limit of geek, for me.

I must have read The Lord Of The Rings a dozen times or more. The Hobbit as often. I have the maps, I saw the movies, and I went to the exhibition of movie props.

But I wouldn’t call myself a total Tolkien fan. I don’t dress up in the costumes – you know, green cloaks that render you invisible against green grass, green rocks, green water, green sky etc.

My copy of The Lord Of The Rings is from three different editions. Nor do I collect memorabilia, or go to Armageddon comic-con gatherings to ogle merchandise and be photographed beside the guy who swept the studio floor on alternate Sundays while they were shooting out-takes for The Return of the King.

It is a limited kind of enthusiasm; and I also view what Tolkien did in a literary sense with a suitably critical eye; he wasn’t perfect, and he wrote a lot of stuff the hard way.

So what is it, for me? Well, it’s the reading experience. Tolkien created a world that became real for the reader. He did it by description – if you open The Lord Of The Rings at virtually any page, you’ll find evocative descriptions of the settings – the sounds, the smells, the feel.

He did it by depth; his world was rich with its own mythology and history, rich with culture, with language, with peoples of all kinds, all of them carefully described.

Not actually Rohan. Tussock and Echium – Patterson’s Curse, in the top of Lindis Pass.

He did it with scope; his themes struck chords with the very heart of western thinking, western mythology, and western culture; epic battles between good and evil, between right and wrong. Clear-cut, scarcely shaded in any greys.

And he did it by giving us heroes we could identify with – not Aragorn, who was the archetypal mythic  hero; but the hobbits, who were ordinary, everyday folk. Effectively, people like us – people who we could identify with and journey with, who became heroic.

A message of hope, swathed in all the things that speak to our sense of culture, right, wrong – and place.

That’s why I like Tolkien. Have you read his books? What draws you to them – for you, is it the reading experience, or something else?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up: more writing tips, humour geekery and other stuff.

Sixty second writing tips: how J K Rowling twisted the tropes

One of the secrets to successful writing is offering something readers can identify with, but that has enough originality to be new. The same…but different.

Modern meets fantasy in another way – a pic I took a few years back of Kastel de Haar, near Utrecht, Netherlands.

J. K. Rowling’s shown us how it’s done. Back in the 1990s, Brit boarding school stories were dead, dead, dead. The world of ripping wheezes at the expense of The Beak, followed by clandestine visits to the tuck shop  with Bunter Major, was soooo 1930s.

Trad magic stories were pretty much dead too – I mean, spells, wizards and potions were so cliched. Put together, they should have worked even less well.

What Rowling did was genius – mashing up two cliches and giving them a twist. That came partly from the way she reinterpreted the spell-and wand trope, partly from the seven-story plot cycle, and partly from her style – easy, unadorned and well pitched for the readership. And now writing has its first billionaire author.

Time for the rest of us to follow suit. But not with school magic mashups. They’ve been done…

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Writing is quality-to-time, not word-count

I am often bemused at the way we measure writing, these days, on word count.

Software rates us on it. Contests pivot on it. You can get widgets that graph word-count on a progress bar. It has become a goal of itself.

All of which, to me, stands against what writing is all about.

When I see someone announce – let’s say on Twitter – that they’ve just written 2000 words, I often say to myself ‘great, but were they the right words?’

And how much more time will be needed to get the finished words?

Let me explain.

To me, the goal of writing is to evoke emotion in a reader. That happens not through word count, but through content. The actual number of words is almost irrelevant in this sense – what we have to look for, instead, is the right words. Do they convey the message? Do they do so with proper structure.

So where does word count come in? It has two places. Structurally, word count is important, because the word count tells you the scale of the work – and from that, you can work out the scale of the relevant components. But it is not a goal. Writing isn’t about words; they are simply the vehicle for ideas, concepts and thoughts.

At professional level it is also a standard measure on which everything from books to  features can be commissioned and paid for. It means publishers can budget production to known scales, and it means authors can budget time, based on how long it will take to complete a piece with x-number of words.

That’s the other issue. Completing a piece to length is a very different matter from writing that number of words.

If I draft a book of 70,000 words, that’s great – but I know there’s a lot of work yet, even on those 70,000 words, before I can submit the MS to my publishers. Even when a complete manuscript goes to a publisher, there may yet be 100 hours spent going through it on my part, checking editorial changes and publisher proofs, or answering queries. All of which is essential to completing the book – and none of which adds word count.

What are your thoughts on this one?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up this week: more writing tips, ‘write it now’, geekery and more.

Write it now, part 17: Tolkien’s lessons about writing a best seller

How do novels become not just sellers, but best sellers – and hyper-sellers?

Hobbit Market, November 2012. I had to lie prone to take this picture. ‘Get up,’ She Who Must Be Obeyed insisted. ‘People will think you’re dead.’

Quality’s important, but not always a criteria. Seldom have I read a novel as incompetently researched and clumsily styled as The Of Vinci Code (I know what I said). I haven’t read Fifty Shades of Grey, nor do I want to, but I’m sure somebody’ll comment about what I am told is, well, derivative dribble.

I posted the other week about how genre becomes popular because it keys into changing social ideals – and last week about how types of genre become specifically popular on the back of particular social trends.

The best-sellers are the ones who float to the top of those heaps. The thing is, they’re usually transient. But every so often a book transcends that – becomes not just a best seller, but a lasting best seller. A classic.

Something everybody has at least heard of – even if they haven’t read it – and which stays in the public mind for years – even decades.

Like The Lord Of The Rings. In just a few heady years during the late 1960s,  J R R Tolkien’s epic effectively mainstreamed fantasy. His mythos was embedded in western popular literature even before Peter Jackson’s movies (filmed in my country and my city, bwahahahaha) catapulted his creation to stratospheric popularity.

Hobbit market, November 2012 – Tolkien, mainstreamed.

An astonishing achievement for a modest and retiring Oxford don who had to be nudged into finishing anything for a publisher.

Tolkien never planned it that way. His publishers didn’t anticipate it either. The book he presented Allen & Unwin with in the early 1950s was barely publishable – they broke it into three parts to spread the risk, and a glance at early print runs reveals it shifted only a few thousand copies.

Then, in the mid-1960s, it took off. Kicked into life by a pirated American edition, followed by Tolkien’s authorised edition. It kept on selling. And on. And on. And on….

What happened?

His themes struck chords with a new generation, particularly the idealised pre-industrial England of the Shire and the hippified, natural Earth-spirit lifestyle of Tom Bombadil. The link between Bombadil and counter-culture values was lampooned with all the subtlety of a sledge-hammer in Bored Of The Rings.

Rohan. No – central Otago. No, Rohan…oh, I give up…

This was a generation that read a lot of fantasy, partly because fantasy had become an element of their fabric of escape. Tolkien met their need on both counts. Genre tastes, in short, had caught up, though his own motives were different in many respects (eerily, also similar – every generation found reason to object to industrialisation).

Other authors tried to imitate him. Tolkien, in short, had created a new genre, about a generation ahead of its time.

Hutt River or Anduin. Well, maybe the houses are the give-away.

As if that wasn’t wonderful enough, the book gained an enduring public audience. Part of that was due to the way that 1960s youth ideals were mainstreamed. Part of it was the scope of Tolkien’s vision, engaging symbolisms at a fundamental level. And that wasn’t surprising. He was trying to write Britain’s missing mythology; he wrote to fundamental themes – capturing our cultural framework in soaring battles between total good and utter evil; the symbolisms of mythic heroism.

All was given a dimension that ordinary people could identify with, through the ordinariness of the hobbits – little folk who, inevitably, were more heroic than anybody could imagine.

A stunning achievement. And not something that can be easily repeated – certainly, I suspect, not by design.

What do you figure?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Next time: getting down to the nuts and bolts of novel writing.  More humour, more writing tips – and, well, more. Watch this space.

Sixty second writing tips: writing in the style of…

One of the hardest things writers face – even if everything else is on par – is that last detail of the art; the style. The actual choice of words.

These are what clothe the skeleton of structure, of content; they give a particular feel to the writing. It is the style –the choice and pattern of words – that makes a particular passage an author’s own.

Mastering style – having control of the words – is as important as any other aspect of writing. It’s also remarkably difficult to master.

So try this. One of the ways music composition is taught is to write something ‘in the style of…’ – forcing the  student to figure out just what composers such as Rachmaninov, Debussy, Bach and so forth actually did in order to get their characteristic sounds. (Last year, I watched 70s prog-rock icon and all round British comedian and musician Rick Wakeman play, live, a string of nursery rhymes “in the style of” these composers. Cool.)

It works for writing, too. Try it.  Pick your favourite author. Look at the way they’ve assembled the words – at the pacing, the vocabulary, the organisation of the sentences, the tone. Make notes. Then try it yourself. It’ll be slow at first, lots of trial and error – but after a while you’ll be able to write ‘in the style of…’

I’m not suggesting such pastiches should become your real style. You have to find your own voice. But working out how other people have done it takes you a long way towards doing that – and towards discovering a good deal more, often by surprise, about how others have done it.

Do you ever try writing ‘in the style of…’?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Write it now part 11: ‘how’ not ‘what’, the key secret to writing it big

Being told that what you write must have a ‘beginning,’ middle’ and ‘end’ must be the oldest and stalest tip in the book.

Made worse because it’s true. Every written piece needs structure, whether it’s a 300-word blog entry or a 600,000 word magnum opus, fiction or non-fiction. Even lists need an organising principle – giving structure.

But what does that really mean?

Over-arching structure varies depending on what you’re writing. Academic essays must have a ‘tell you three times’ structure – abstract, argument and conclusion. In fiction – let’s say the ‘hero journey’, the beginning is the normal world; the middle the second act, where the hero learns; and the end the third, climactic act. Think Star Wars or Wizard of Oz.

Blog posts or feature articles (same thing, writing-wise) use the inverted pyramid – broad-spectrum grab-line, expository, and punch-out, usually on a specific point.

The trick is being able to express it – to make ‘what’ you are writing fit in with ‘how’ you want the work to be structured.

Let’s say you’re writing a novel and you’ve got a list of cool scenes for your character. Or an idea for non-fiction. What do you do?

First off, set the scenes aside. The first steps in the journey from germ of idea to published work have little to do with the ‘what’ of the content, and a lot to do with the ‘how’.

Start by creating a log-line – the sentence that describes what you are trying to do. In non-fiction or academia it’s called the ‘thesis’ – but it’s functionally the same thing. (Academics call a document with supporting argument a ‘thesis’, but technically it is the sentence defining what they’re trying to argue).

I’ve posted many times before about the importance of having a log-line first as a start point. This is why.

The log line gives you the journey, which means you can plan out ‘how’ you are going to do it. This is the key step. Let’s say your logline reads ‘Downtrodden girl has to find strength in herself to save a kingdom and so make her dreams come true.’

Focus on the emotional side – on the character arc – for example:

1. Beginning. Introduce characters from the POV of the downtrodden girl.

2. Middle. Follow experiences of main character as she begins to grow and realise she can break free, if only she knew how. A challenge is laid down; she so wants to meet it, but is prevented by her oppressive family. She is shown how to break free by a mentor, who helps her achieve what seems to be her dream.

3. End. What appeared to be her dream is not her true dream; but because she has gained new confidence she is able to step out and seize the moment when it comes. Her character arc is complete and the story ends.

Notice how I managed to not mention fairy godmothers, wicked witches, ugly sisters, handsome princes, tin men, lions or wizards in emerald cities. The details of the plot – come later –Wizard of Oz or Cinderella, depending on choice. But that’s the point. At this over-arching structural stage, the ‘scene by scene’ details are less important.

They come later – well, next week, in fact.

Meanwhile – have you had experiences with structure? Do you start with a logline?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Sixty second writing tips: coining the right name

Some time after The Lord of The Rings was published, J. R. R. Tolkien fielded a letter from Sam Gamgee. A real Sam Gamgee.

It wasn’t surprising. Tolkien – a philologist –  mined English convention for his Shire and Hobbit names. Another was Peregrin Took – the first name is known, though Steve Peregrin Took wasn’t born with it – his real name was Stephen Ross Porter.

A few authors deliberately use real names. I’m thinking George McDonald Fraser, whose Flashman stories were riddled with real historical figures doing real things. Fun stuff.

Occasionally authors add a real name for other purposes, like the time Michael Crichton included a critic as one of his incidental bad-guys.

My tips? I think that…

1. If you’re writing fantasy, it’s important to have names that sound ‘real’ together – not random collections of syllables kludged up on the spot. Make lists before you start.

2. If the story is set in the present, it has to be a name that won’t leave anybody with the same name offended. One book I read included an unlikeable US Secretary of State named (wait for it…) ”Trachea”. Little risk of lawsuit there. Lawsuit? Sure. Your bad guy turns out to have the same name as a genuine individual you weren’t aware of. It’s happened.

3. Coined names that reflect characteristics can work if done judiciously. J K Rowling is a master of it.

Do these tips work for you? Have you ever had trouble creating names for characters? And how have you got around it?

 Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up this weekend: ‘write it now’ – pantsing vs structure; and fun with comets.

Write it now, part 6: the broad skill that is writing

What sort of writing do you dream of doing?

It’s not an idle question. I was chatting with someone via twitter a little while back about writing, and it finally dawned on me that their definition of ‘writer’ and ‘writing’ was actually ‘novellist’ – they assumed that everybody who dreamed of ‘becoming’ a writer wanted to write fiction; this defined the field for them.

That, in fact, is what I was formally trained in myself. But alas, I had to admit, the book I was working on was non-fiction.

Writing encompasses not just novel writing – and all the genres of it – but also short story writing (a different skill set), essays, science papers, journalism – feature writing in particular – non-fiction in its many forms. Even blogging, which is a slight variant on the feature writing skill set.

All of them draw from the core competence of being able to write - the control of words to evoke emotion. It seems to me that writers should tackle more than one of the types of writing before they go on to specialise. It gives different insights into the essential skill – making words your servant, so as to evoke an emotion in the reader. Writing in a different field forces control of style and content. It means you are familiar with more than just the specific skills needed for your preferred genre or field. And that breadth pays dividends. It all feeds together. You’ll be surprised how it works when you then come to the aspect of writing that you’re most passionate about.

It shouldn’t be daunting. One way is to go blogging, which has the double benefit of expanding your author platform – gets everything moving towards the same end goal.

There’s nothing unusual about this approach; a broad skill base is an essential part of formal training in many arts. Musicians do it – some music qualifications, for instance, specifically require that a performer master a second instrument. It’s true for actors, too. We often classify actors by their best known roles – but in fact, the best actors are trained to play anyone – and perform in any genre. Think of Michael Caine – a brilliant dramatic actor who is also a brilliant comedian.

It’s the same with writing. Remember Isaac Asimov? He tackled everything from short stories to novels to popular science essays to limericks. Because, for him, writing was a profession – he had total control of his words, and that made it a transferable skill that allowed him to write virtually anything.

I think that’s a good way for any writer to be.

What do you figure?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

Coming up this week: Inspirations in New Zealand’s deep south, more on kindness, science geekery, and more.

Sixty second writing tips: avoiding word-count guilt

These days we are prisoners to the idea that achievement in writing equates to number of words written. I often see tweets from writers bemoaning lack of progress, because they missed the target.

Well, I don’t subscribe to this idea at all. Word count is an essential writing tool. Publishers and editors use it to define scale of commissioned work. Writers have to learn to meet those counts. It’s part of the skill set.

But it is not an end in itself. What counts more is whether what’s been written meets the purpose intended by the author. Which, ultimately, is to evoke an emotion in the recipient. So instead of feeling guilty at not having written x-number of words, try looking back over what you’ve achieved in terms of those deeper goals and aims of writing. The key questions are:

1. Has it advanced your intent in the writing?
2. Is the style to your liking? Are they the right words?

In short, what counts is the quality of end product – focus on purpose. Being able to produce that to a specified word length is one marker of that quality. But only one.

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013

How Tolkien became part of my life. Is he part of yours?

Forty years after I first encountered the work of John Ronald Reuel Tolkien, I am still on a wonderful journey of discovery in his world.

I had moment to think about it on the weekend when my wife and I passed through Miramar, Wellington and stopped at the ‘Weta Cave’. It’s a store run by Weta Workshop, who made the props for Peter Jackson’s adaptations of Tolkien’s work.  In typical Kiwi fashion it’s in an unprepossessing building of late 1930s austerity construction.

Weta Cave – unprepossessing ordinariness masking the home of something truly extraordinary.

Most of the buildings in the area are like this. It’s the heart of Peter Jackson’s movie-making empire. You wouldn’t think so, to look at it. But that’s the magic of movies for you.

It’s all in an ordinary industrial-style street. I don’t know if these warehouses, directly opposite Jackson’s post-production building, are part of the studio or not, though interesting drumming noises were coming out of them when I took this photo.

Though the Park Road Post Production building is pretty impressive.

I took this from the street.

The visit – coupled with last week’s viewing of The Hobbit movie - got me thinking. I wouldn’t call myself a ‘fan’. I approach Tolkien with a critical eye, I don’t consume every word.  Each volume in my copy of The Lord of The Rings is from a totally different paperback edition and I’ve never bothered to get any of the different illustrated, one-volume or ‘collectors’ versions issued since.

But I like his created world and his writing very much indeed, and have ever since I was eight or nine - about as long,  in fact, that I’ve been writing myself.

It was the Pauline Baynes map that captured me first. Her artwork  was evidently frowned upon by Tolkien himself. But it spoke of adventure, of exploration – of the unknown. I wanted to experience that magic – to live that world. I started imagining. A little later, I read The Hobbit. And I was hooked. I still have that copy of the book, the third edition paperback with Tolkien’s own ‘Death of Smaug’ sketch as cover art. It’s totally battered. I don’t know how often I’ve read it. Lots.

A year or two after that I read The Lord Of The Rings. And read it again. And again. And again. And many times again after that. I’ve read it only twice since I was a teenager – but I can still pretty much quote passages from it.

Check out the wear and tear. Is my copy of ‘The Hobbit’ much-loved, or what?

Tolkien’s work spoke to me on many levels. He conveyed a sense of wonder on an epic scale, yet in terms that brought that wonder back to ‘ordinary’ through the hobbits. I could share their sense of discovery, of growth, as the world unfolded for them – and which they had to find the strength to handle.

Later, as I learned more about literature and writing, I came to realise just how much of the essence of the western mind Tolkien had put into his work. My enjoyment of his world became a journey of discovery - re-awakening a sense of wonder when I read his material.

I am still on that journey, and it is a wonderful journey indeed.

How about you? Are you a Tolkien enthusiast? What drew you to his work? And if he’s not your cup of tea – well, what doesn’t appeal? It’s all valid. I don’t like some of his material myself, actually – too inaccessible, too academic; or written in ways that don’t capture. As I say, I approach this with a critical eye – not adulating fandom. But what he imagined remains very much a part of my life.

What are your thoughts?

Copyright © Matthew Wright 2013