Interviewer: Would you rather be remembered as a man who said something or a man who made something?
Tolkien: I don't think you can distinguish. The made thing, unless it says something, won't be remembered.
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@not-a-toad
Interviewer: Would you rather be remembered as a man who said something or a man who made something?
Tolkien: I don't think you can distinguish. The made thing, unless it says something, won't be remembered.
I love writing. I LOVE WRITING. THE ART OF ALL ARTS.
@ach-sss-no
#AAAAAAAAAAAA#see TOLKIEN LOVES GOLLUM
There is allegedly an interview where Jirt is asked who his favorite LOTR character was and says something like 'Gollum grew on me' in response, but 1) I can't find it, 2) he may have been lightly trolling the interviewer, as I imagine I would do at every available opportunity if I wrote The Most Popular Book Ever and had to field an ensuing lifetime of stupid questions about it.
So instead I am going to highlight this passage from The Two Towers and ask you to consider the authorial point of view that would craft this description
Not even an eagle poised against the sun would have marked the hobbits sitting there, under the weight of doom, silent, not moving, shrouded in their thin grey cloaks. For a moment he might have paused to consider Gollum, a tiny figure sprawling on the ground: there perhaps lay the famished skeleton of some child of Men, its ragged garment still clinging to it, its long arms and legs almost bone-white and bone-thin: no flesh worth a peck.
Look, I don't know why jirt wrote that. I can't ask him. But i've read a lot of fanfic, and I am a user of tumblr dot com, and I can tell you that if i saw a fanfic author or a tumblr person write that description of a character, a description where the character is poetically compared to a child that died of starvation, one of the most piteous concepts that humankind knows of, I would take that to mean that character was the writer's favorite special baby. Take that as you will.
that interview is this one:
That part about Gollum begins at the 19:30 mark
This is a somewhat accurate transcription (because he keeps mumbling):
Interviewer: Asking how The Lord of the Rings began leads on to this question—
Tolkien interrupts him: Then it grew! Then grew without control.
Interviewer: Without control? Well, this is the point: you did not have a scheme? No outline at all?
Tolkien: Well except there was a major one, that the Ring it ought to be—
Interviewer: I mean, did you know the Ring had to be destroyed from the beginning?
Tolkien: Oh, yes, yes, because Gandalf says so quite early. Therefore at some point, a Hobbit, he has to make his way to the cracks of doom obviously, and that's the only thing, and several times I'd try to write that last scene ahead of time, but it didn't come out, it never worked. Oh, I had to wait for it to come through.
Interviewer: Did you decide right at the beginning that Gollum was to play such a part, or did you go back to the book after and write in the various linking parts of Gollum?
Tolkien: You couldn't get Gollum out, could you? If you think of Gollum's relation to the Ring, if the Ring is going to be important than the Gollum business must be important. I liked him better than all the other characters, and I'm much more sorry for him.
Interviewer (laughs a little): But you see this is interesting because he's practically the only grey character with a possibly exception of Boromir right to the book.
Tolkien: And Denethor
Interviewer: And Denethor, yes, the others are almost completely black and white.
Tolkien: They all have their temptations, actually
Interviewer: They all have their temptations, but nevertheless, the moment you've established your character, um, your reader knows what his, what his own personal character is, he's going to be a goodie or a baddie.
Tolkien: Yes, yes, one knows that that isn't generally true, I have to simplify a little bit
Interviewer: That's why Gollum is so interesting because one, you know he, he almost repents at one point, doesn't he, where he sees Frodo—
Tolkien: That's to me the most poignant bit of the whole story, the most poignant moment of all, cause it's so terribly true, it's the good people that do the damage so often. It was fair, Sam's suspicious faith, this was very much justified, which ruined Gollum. (He sighs) You see that if you go a long, long way in wickedness, then comes your chance, which you can't therefore demand, that it's made nice and easy at that point, it's going to be probably very sticky, the last chance, and it was too sticky for Gollum. Because I printed a lot of thought on it, because he grew on me.
I mean I could almost see Gollum, where I've been most criticized by certain people, and where I think I'm the most right, is making point of the fact, that though I do praise them for seeing it, is that Frodo actually failed. The thing that some people have said about it, so strongly, there is a lot of thought in this age, when we are now faced with the, with the absolute certainty of pressures, which can't be resisted.
People do, good people do realise more clearly than ever before that the motives that would go into such a situation are so important. It's very rash to put yourself in a position that you know to be too powerful for you, that's presumption. If you're going with good emotion and then land in a position which you can't face up to then that's up to the government, isn't it? Some people have been very angry about it.
I found this quote from Diana Wynne Jones (Author of novels Howl's Moving Castle and Castle in the Air) on her time at Oxford when she had C.S. Lewis and Tolkien as professors and I thought I couldn't relate to Jrrt any more than I already did but I've been proven wrong.
"[C. S. Lewis] was just a marvelous lecturer: he made the dullest topics absolutely shine. He lectured in the very largest of lecture halls, which was a huge “L” shape, and it was packed, with people standing in the aisles, even early in the morning. Everybody drank it in. Obviously a whole lot of people took this away and thought about it, and began writing - mostly for children because in those days you couldn’t write fantasy for anyone else. Tolkien was a different matter. He was just a kind of eminence grise and a legend. You couldn’t hear him lecture. He worked at not letting you hear, because he wanted to go away and finish writing The Lord of the Rings. So he had the very smallest lecture room. First of all it was packed out, so he spoke with his back to the audience and mumbling. Unfortunately he was talking about - meditating on, really - what a plot is like and how it mutates into other plots, and this I found so fascinating that I went back the next week as did one other person. And this meant that he couldn’t stop lecturing and still get the money, which apparently in those days you could if no one turned up - it was a dreadful racket, really. He could have given just the one lecture and then been paid for a term if we’d all stayed away. But this other person and I attended diligently week after week, so he was forced to go on meditating about plots mutating, and what I could hear was fascinating, because he was busy with the really large orchestration of the latter part of The Lord of the Rings at the time. But all I retain is a sense of how marvelous the way plots work is. That was all I got out of it, but I kept going in case I might understand a bit more next week - let alone hear a bit more."
(Quoted from “Interview with Diana Wynne Jones, 22 March 2001, conducted by Charles Butler.”)
I remember referring to this interview a long time ago, before the Howl renaissance, citing it while saying something like “don’t beat yourself up too much by comparing the development of your writing skills to Tolkien, because among OTHER writing aids he had (nannies, servants, a fulltime housewife, a private cook) he VERY MUCH slacked off his (prestigious, privileged, came with a private office/free lunch/servants, well paid, consisted of being left respectfully alone to be a genius) day job to write his fiction.” And someone sent me a bunch of very upset messages about how none of that was true, and when I was like, here are his letters about his servants and nannies, here is what Dianne Actual Wynne Jones wrote when she was his actual student, here is the labor context of Oxford; they said “who cares about how an obscure nobody had failed her classes.”
It was only a dumb exchange but it stuck with me, DWJ the obscure nobody. As a kid I remembered when Harry Potter came out and everyone was like “well, bookish child, don’t you love it?” And I would reply that for British boarding school fantasies about witches you couldn’t do better than Witch Week, and would receive the same reaction. “Who do you mean and why are you bothering?”
So thank you for all being so interested in the obscure nobody. I perennially love the image of her making Tolkien do his damn day job
You know, the fact that Diana Wynn Jones is forgotten while Rowling is famous and working on passing legislature to kill trans kids really fucking pisses me off.
Everything cool and interesting in Harry Potter is in Jones’s work. She did it first and did it better.
But she was Welsh. And the Welsh people still get looked down on by the British, because they were colonized.
Yet people still buy the books of a colonialist british bigot, but pass on the works from the Welsh woman she got her ideas from. And she did get her ideas from Jones. Once you start looking, it becomes really clear the Rowling borrowed heavily from Jones, but she never admitted or acknowledged it.
Yes, Jones makes missteps in her early work, but she tries to improve and adjust her views and that is clear in her writing. She was always and always will be better than Rowling.
i'm currently reading a delightfully dull book about Tolkien's unfinished annotated student edition of Chaucer, written by someone who started at Tolkien's college almost immediately after he stopped working there, and in it i have learned some fun things about tolkien, chaucer, and mid 20th century academic publication.
but my favorite thing is that Diana Wynne Jones' husband (identified as such in the text, i have already forgotten his actual name again) is quoted on these same lectures, and the fact that Diana liked them.
turns out he was the 'one other person.'
Although Tolkien never really discussed this at length, the plot of LOTR and especially Silmarillion imply some really interesting ideas about immortality. Sure, he says that mortal men need to accept their mortality, because it’s inevitable, and the pseudo-immortality offered to some of them is a trap that will take their selfhood and autonomy. But then he also writes a whole race of immortals and says that they need to learn to accept loss and grief and change: even if they themselves don’t die, time will pass and things will change, and an immortal who cannot let go of ephemeral things will die over and over, or break the world in trying to recover what he lost.
Never really discussed this at length?
Interviewer: so you built a whole fictional world before writing the book
Tolkien: yes
Interviewer: why?
Tolkien, literally: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
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The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King (2003)
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How did you get so good at writing??? Did you take classes? I feel like you should get paid all the money for this! (I subscribe to your website!)
after i dropped out of high school i found a torrent of like 5GB of OCRd romance novels and i read like 3 romance novels a day for a while
read enough romance novels and you will realize that they live or die entirely on technical skill. if you are new to romance novels then even bad ones can dazzle you with novelty but by the time you are on your 30th historical fake engagement between a bluestocking and a rakish duke you can grade them and you know when they've failed. when two books have what should be the same main characters hitting the same plot beats, but one of those books is delightful and the other fucking sucks, you learn some things. some books are bad and still delightful. other books are good but they just don't hit. you start to see the seams in the bad ones. 'oh, this is a weird out of character moment because she wanted to have the kabedon moment and didn't know how to get there'. 'she didn't want the ust to end but couldn't think of a better reason than this deus ex cockblock.' that kind of thing.
you could probably do this with other genres but i like romance because the plot is two people fall in love. that's it. everything else is set dressing. if you can figure out how to make that work you can carry it over into whatever other genre you feel like. mysteries would give you a different skillset around plotting that i don't have.
anyway after that i wrote a lot.
i said it in my original tags but i want to talk out of my ass and say that one place that a lot of current romantasy falls short for me is that it ends up being written by people who mostly read other romantasy without going back to the original genres of romance and fantasy. it's like a 'learn the rules before you can break them' kind of thing. you have all these magical macguffins to hit the tropes but can you make me believe that these characters have chemistry without that? is there chemistry, or did you tell me they're fated mates and now i'm supposed to assume this fight is sexy? does the fantasy aspect exist for anything aside from the magical macguffins? i'm not going to throw stones from inside my house made of worldbuilding designed to make all my fetishes happen, but the really fun part is when the lore spins out of control and you end up really going in depth on linguistic anthropology things that aren't relevant to the makeouts.
and the other thing is that you can't really sub in fanfic for this. plenty of fanfic takes characters from other genres and plops them into romance, but it's not the same. a good romance novel says, "here are two characters. you may know their archetypes, but you don't know them. you are going to get to know them, and you are going to love them, and you are going to want them to love each other, and when they love each other you are going to be happy for them". i love a rakish duke. when a man who's never had to do his own laundry is slutty as fuck that's my shit. but you still have to make me like him. you can take that archetype and make a guy who fucking sucks. most fanfic will not impart to you any knowledge about how to make a reader like a guy from scratch. you already know that guy. that's the whole point. fanfic with as much character building as an original work is the exception, not the rule.
the whole reason i get catty about fics that just make a different guy is that... you've made a different guy. i don't know who this guy is and i don't like him, and you haven't bothered trying to make me like him, because you slapped another guy's nametag on him like a cheat code. it's cool if you did make me like this new guy, but why is he wearing that other guy's nametag if no other aspect of him is present?
read the genres you want to write, obviously, but there's a reason the shitty comphet romantic subplot is a cliche. it's because romance is its own skillset, and if you try to fit romance in your thriller when you only read thrillers it's probably going to be the weakest part. if you want an ensemble cast then chemistry between characters is important regardless of whether they're going to fuck about it.
#this is also what i call the Star Wars Problem (although: wide category lol)#but i mean specifically the thing where george lucas watched a BUNCH of westerns and samurai films and ww2 flying ace films#and then made a space movie ABOUT high points in those other story forms#because he knew those pulp genres inside out and knew what bits he needed to hit in RAF Dambusters pulp when he added laser swords#or in western saloon showdowns when he added spaceships#but then you fast-forward a few decades and people are making star wars movies ABOUT other star wars movies#and like not many of those scenes are going to hit that way - they just wont have the chance#they’ll be a copy of a copy and the emotion is going to degrade like the worlds crustiest reformatted ocr PDF#or a xerox of a xerox of a xerox#they’ve ceased to be about the feeling generated by the Form and have become simply the Form in isolation (via harrietvane)
To be clear. Shane's whole thing about Ilya being a Sex God is because of the limerence. Ilya is nineteen and he can get a rhythm going and that's about it. He was throwing shit at the wall when he hit that 'Get on your knees' in Nashville but only he knows that because Shane's brain turned OFF. Ilya said "Let's do a little experiment here" and the results were "Oh my god oh my god oh my god." Shane came hands free because he was that obsessed with the idea of Ilya Rozanov being inside him. Ilya said "Do you like that do you like that" because he's nineteen and he needs the validation and Shane was like "YES YES YES I LIKE IT OH MY GOD YOU'RE SO DEEP YOU'RE SO GOOD" and objectively. It was okay. Ilya fully did not know where to put his hands a couple of times. He forgot about Shane's dick. Luckily, Shane is God's special angel who can come from the idea of Ilya's cockhead being in proximity to his prostate a few times. Mind over matter, says Shane Hollander's dick. And then Ilya said "Oh God Hollander" because it was also, objectively, one of the hottest things that had ever happened to HIM, Ilya Rozanov. Shane sits on that step afterwards plotting about how he's gonna get this over and over and over again for the rest of his life and he has no idea that there are women in Boston who have Ilya listed in their contacts as "Hockey Guy 6/10". Shane Hollander cannot fathom a world in which Ilya Rozanov doesn't lay the maddest pipe this side of Lake Michigan. "Ilya Rozanov is a some kind of nineteen year old sex God" No Shane honey he was just designed in a lab to score goals and make you cum and he's done scoring goals for the night.
we have to start running a massive PSA campaign to young gay people so everyone understands there is a difference between being a dom and being a top and between being a sub and being a bottom. and also that sometimes you are neither a sub nor a bottom and you're just like shy. we need to be handing out flyers we need ads at every train station spreading the word
also those things are roles related to sexual preference, not facets of your gender. look at me. write this down. bottoming or topping is *something you like to do.* it's not a diagnostic of your gender. being a dom or a sub is a position you take in a sexual roleplay. these are preferences you might have and it's normal to like many different things. stop treating it like a cosmo personality quiz.
They're also not mutually exclusive. You can be a submissive top or a dominant bottom or switch it around depending on partner, mood, etc. You can have no preference at all, or prefer a more balance and equitable exchange during intimacy, and none of this is set in stone.
just have fun and be yourself
i always thought it was funny how in the lord of the rings sam and frodo head out and after awhile sam’s like “mr. frodo if i take one more step this is the farthest from the shire ive ever been” and then a ways after they meet up with merry and pippin on their daily vegetable run like jesus christ sam get out of the house once in awhile
is jake gyllenhaal gay??
why would you ask us, a narnia blog, this