Tolkien - tumblr archive

[meridian_rose]

I've been having a brief discussion about Lord of the Rings, and the Hobbit. I recall an article or possibly LJ/Tumblr post about Tolkien and the Hobbit. He wouldn't stop editing it. Eventually his close writer friends had to basically stage an intervention before he ruined the book.
Food for thought for writers who can't stop tinkering, no matter how much we quote Leonardo, "Art is never finished, only abandoned".

If anyone knows the post I'm talking about please do let me know :)

Anyway in looking for that I found this on my old Tumblr. You can read the article How To Tell If You Are in a JRR Tolkien Book for yourself. (There was a load of those articles at one point for various books/genres and they were good fun at the time.)

Screencap


“You long to go on an adventure, but only so long as the adventure is not in any way uncomfortable or inconvenient.” Totally me.

Also this reblog shows pictures of dragons by Tolkien, starting with the picture that is on my copy of The Hobbit:

So that picture has special meaning. The book actually came with the The Hobbit text-based adventure game for the Commodore 64. I read the book. I hoped it would help me win the game. I did the "'WAIT' command so the trolls kept arguing until dawn" part. I wandered the Misty Mountains. Thorin kept singing about gold. I kept getting stuck in the barrels and never met Gollum or completed the game! There was not the wealth of user guides to purchase or view online in those days :P

Comments

[grayestofghosts]

With Tolkien's friends telling him to stop editing... I think a lot about how books were edited before word processors. Neuromancer was written on a typewriter, even. I have a feeling it's much, much easier to over-edit now that we have the technology to do so. Books from before and after wordprocessors definitely have different vibes. I wonder if there's been a study on it?

I don't know. I tend to abandon works before they're even finished once, so it's less of a problem for me, I think.

[meridian_rose]

That's a great point. Authors would pay typists to type their handwritten manuscripts and that's not cost effective if you start rewriting whole chapters! It would definitely be interesting to read about a study on that, how tech has impacted authors and editors.

It is a common theme at writing comms and in Snowflake entries that every writer has too many unfinished WiPs. They're totally not abandoned most of us protest about the ones we really can't let go. I suppose they're just "on hiatus".