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#1 |
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Character assassin
Join Date: Feb 2005
Location: On the sofa, with cat and laptop
Posts: 539
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For an idea of the amount of writing Tolkien produced, see the 12 volumes of The Complete History of Middle-Earth. Copious amounts of rewriting, rewriting, composition, doodles that became sketches, maps, geneaologies, etc. etc. I admire Christopher for trying to organize the paperwork his dad left behind, and for trying to interpret his father's handwriting.
Another book is Ruth Noel's The Languages of Tolkien's Middle-Earth. She gives the basics into the linguistic history he used and what the words really mean. In Middle-Earth, every name carries meaning and weight. And a lot of it goes back to Beowulf and the Elder Edda sagas. Karen (who loved her Old English class in university)
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What we call the beginning is often the end And to make an end is to make a beginning. The end is where we start from. --T. S. Eliot, "Little Gidding" Daily word count - 1621(as of 1/21) WIP progress - 89071 |
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#2 | |
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Harmless Giant
Join Date: Feb 2005
Posts: 2,879
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Quote:
What some people don't know is how many re-writes of every single chapter, and every single book, Tolkien did. If he changed something in chapter eighteen, and the rest wasn't consistant, he'd go back and re-write the first seventeen chapters. Again, this was before Microsoft word, when you had to rewrite every single page on a non-electric typewriter. His letters alone had multiple drafts. |
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#3 |
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keyboard monkey
Join Date: Jun 2005
Location: Norwich, UK
Posts: 542
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I'm writing a really non-hardcore scifi/fantasy series. It's sort of Space Opera-meets-ChickLit, a very mainstream (hopefully) scifi dish. One thing that I've found, with regard to names, is that I personally hate fantasy-spacey names like Zack Starthruster, or Qui'-thalth'ignufar. I much prefer names that feel grounded in the contemporary, but perhaps very...very slightly abstracted eg: Jon, Hal. Certainly I think the mass market..ie: those who never touch scifi/fantasy...are more likely to give it a go if on page one, they encounter names they feel familiar with.
Of course, I may just be wasting my time writing a chicklit/space opera for the masses, but, it's an original idea atleast. |
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#4 | |
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Harmless Giant
Join Date: Feb 2005
Posts: 2,879
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Quote:
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