Writing Worlds
For me, J. R. R. Tolkien transformed the world of fiction writing. What does this mean?
He created his own ways of telling stories. He imagined and portrayed entire worlds. He wielded storytelling language so distinctively, so powerfully, so engagingly, that legions of his readers entered his worlds and never returned.
Literary critics loathed his work. They came to it equipped with all the tools of 20th-century thinking: profound pessimism and irreligion, sleek expression, absence of ornament, linear narrative, economy of settings. They beat at him with all of these criteria, savaging his sense of hope and faith, his wandering telling, his lingering over details of scene and language, his intertwining of multiple narratives, and his vivid, overwhelming world of Middle-earth.
Many millions of readers loved it, all of it. In the 20th century, estimated sales of The Lord of the Rings ran to between 150 and 200 million books. As of 2019, it has had 87 translations into 57 languages. Critics be damned.
The effects of Tolkien's success forged lessons for many writers of fiction. All by itself, it rekindled focus and appreciation of the great sagas of myth and storytelling. Its grandeur and clarity of spirit shocked awake the sense of hope that much of contemporary literature had abandoned. Its power of elevated language, woven expertly with common vernaculars, dragged readers of everyday fiction up into an atmosphere of beauty and wonder.
It awakened my own writing forever. Before I read Tolkien, I had never considered writing fiction. His work set me on fire. I had read a lot of fiction, from childhood on, but this was utterly wondrous and potent. I started creating a world, as a child might take his crayons and draw the sun and the grass and the houses. It was magical. But my life interfered.
A different kind of magic had already taken root in me: the transformative power of spirit. By the time Tolkien's work came to me, I had inhaled the intoxicating mysticism and metaphor of inner search. Tolkien had imbued his work with the signs of such journeys, and the effect was to intensify my hunger to express the force, the excitement, the yearning, and the challenge of the seeker.
The consequences for my writing were to place it well outside the accepted genres, structures, and styles of the publishing world. Imagine a universe whose author is in the continual process of reinventing it; extending it; entangling its features and character with new unknowns; populating it with characters whose lives bloom and fade as the narrative wanders, races, and explodes here, there, and everywhere; adorning it with gardens of unanticipated fragrance and oubliettes of alien stench; spawning names, terms, verses, songs, and images of wonder all through.
Welcome to such a world, if you dare. It will charm and repel, attract and disgust, entertain and challenge, uplift and drag down, but it is hope. It draws toward light.
The fiction of the 21st century will draw us increasingly toward light. Let us begin learning to write it.
