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’I was delayed,’ said Gandalf, ’and that nearly proved our ruin. And yet I am not sure; it may have been better so.’

’I was delayed,’ said Gandalf, ’and that nearly proved our ruin. And yet I am not sure: it may have been better so. Knowing the peril I should not have dared to take such risks, and we might either have been trapped in the Shire, or if I had tried some long way round we might have been hunted down in some wild place far from all help. As it is we have escaped the pursuit – for the moment.’

Själv har jag inte läst Letters, måste försöka få tag i den vid tillfälle.

So, for various reasons, I'm rereading the HISTORY OF MIDDLE-EARTH books about the writing of Lord of the Rings. They're fascinating (for certain values of fascinating); what I'm going to do this time try to extract writing advice (thread)

Tolkien wrote drafts out by hand; he'd make scribbled notes on one draft that might get worked into the next. Most of the drafts were preserved, so we get to trace how the story evolves and changes. Basically, it's the Track Changes of doom.

First off - Tolkien sets out to write a sequel to the Hobbit, and he has absolutely no idea what it's about. But the man's a pantser (not a panther, autocorrect), so he just starts writing. And Hobbit nonsense amuses him, so we get a lot of Hobbit nonsense at the start.

The basic elements of 'A LONG-EXPECTED PARTY' are there, and some of the dialogue and description survives through many *many* drafts to the final text. Stuff like the fireworks, the various Hobbit families, the speeches. And Bilbo vanishing with the ring.

But he has no idea where Bilbo's going or why. There's a vague idea that he's run out of money, or gotten bored with the Shire, but that's about it. Still, Tolkien's already crossed the hardest threshold - he's broken the white page and actually written something.

Pretty soon, though, he runs into a problem. The Hobbit ended with "Bilbo lived happily to the end of his days", and obviously, he can't go back and change a published book - that'd be madness. So, either he sticks with Bilbo as his protagonist, or he comes up with a new hero.

Enter... Bingo Baggins.

Bilbo's son and heir.

Thread 2! We're starting in THE TREASON OF ISENGARD, Volume 7 of the History of Middle-earth.

(I lost my copy of 8 and haven't actually read ever gotten to read Vol. 9, but copies of both are on their way.)

So, having reached Balin's tomb, and with a rough idea of where the book's going to go, Tolkien... goes back and revises his first chapters again. At length.

A lot of this is polishing, changing character names, amplifying concepts. The Black Riders steadily become more sinister, for example; the Ring more important.

He's still wobbling about various elements, too. Odo/Fatty Bolger (now renamed Hamilcar for a while) is still running around with Gandalf in some drafts, although you can see Tolkien moving towards the idea that Gandalf's been taking prisoner.

Trotter's going to be a Man - no, he's Bilbo's cousin, Peregrin Bolger. No, he's a Man. At a guess, Tolkien was still vacillating between trying to write something closer to the Hobbit, with its cast of largely interchangeable dwarves, and something more complex and epic.

I know from my writing, if I'm unsure about something fundamental, it's very hard to make progress. Sometimes, you've got to go back and fix problems; sometimes, it's better to plough ahead and discover the rest of the story so you've got a different perspective on earlier stuff.

I don't think there's a single easy answer. Maybe "whatever you do, keep working on it!" - but then again, sometimes a break is exactly what you need.

I guess "don't give up" works as a universal aphorism, but that's not exactly a perfectly engineered writing tool.

Advice is a toolbox.

All right, here's thread #3, as we go through THE WAR OF THE RING, the next volume of the HISTORY OF MIDDLE-EARTH

The War of the Ring, by the way, was a potential title for the third volume of Lord of the Rings, which Tolkien preferred to Return of the King, as it wasn't a spoiler.

The Lord of the Rings was never intended to be a trilogy, either - Tolkien assumed it'd be published as one big volume.

At one point, in fact, he was agitating for it to be published as one big volume WITH THE SILMARILLION included. Paper shortages after the war put an end to that idea.

But it's amusing that the whole tradition of epic fantasy coming in trilogies is mostly a result of budget crunch at Unwin & Co.

Why, Mr. Frodo, remember when you were Bingo, sir? Or Odo Bolger coming to Rivendell on the back of Mr. Gandalf's horse? Or the time we were imprisoned by Giant Treebeard in his garden? Don't these twitter threads never end?

HISTORY OF MIDDLE-EARTH THREAD 4 - SAURON DEFEATED