Input Junkie

A dive into Tolkien and maps. In particular, that Tolkien said in a letter to Naomi Mitchison, that "I wisely started with a map". What could he have meant?

We find out that Tolkien certainly didn't start with a map. As we all know, Tolkien started with the languages. Or with an inspiration for the first line of The Hobbit. Or with having a substantial education in old literature and languages. The maps came later, and started with maps of localities where movement needed to be clear, rather than a map of middle earth.

However, apparently some creators take the quote about starting with a map very seriously, and they shouldn't. The video ends with a rant about not letting world-building distract you from writing, though world-building can be a great hobby in itself. There's a lot about the excuses people make to avoid writing, and I don't know how sound it all is.

There is scholarship about Tolkien and maps. Of course there is. I hadn't realized how vague the maps and geography in The Hobbit are compared to LOTR, and how much doesn't match up. I now imagine the Necromancer from The Hobbit waking up in The Lord of the Rings and saying, "Huh? What?".

Anyway, "the Fiery Mountain [from The Hobbit], whose actual placing seems to be entirely vague", from Christopher Tolkien, who made the finished map for LOTR.

The brings back a bit of my headcanon for the Silmarillion. There's mention of a wingless dragon; A wingless dragon seemed a bit odd to me, but alright, it's a wingless dragon. Later in the story, Morgoth(?) has a battle where a dragon would be helpful, but the dragon can't get there in time. And I had a vision of Tolkien with a map and miniatures (I don't think he actually used miniatures, and I don't know whether a literal map was involved) considering how the dragon could be kept out of the fight. I don't know at what point of writing the story Tolkien came up with the dragon.

The video guy is from a game called Monstrous. I needed to sort out that this isn't related to the graphic novel Monstress, which has fabulously beautiful art though I wasn't that interested in the story.

From a retrospective about Roth

The crude cliché is that the writer is solving the problem of his life in his books. Not at all. What he's doing is taking something that interests him in life and then solving the problem of the book - which is, How do you write about this?

Link thanks to supergee.

Here's Paul Graham on essays.

After a history of how non-fiction prose has come to be taught--it comes partly from the renaisssance work of assimilating classical culture and partly from legal argument, he gives a description of essays--a sort of writing which begins with a question rather than a premise and which describes the discursive work of getting an answer.

(IIRC, I was never given any systematic explanation, good or bad, of how to write an essay, but I do remember having to write about who was the tragic hero of _Julius Caesar_ and wondering why anybody would care.)

The river's algorithm is simple. At each step, flow down. For the essayist this translates to: flow interesting. Of all the places to go next, choose the most interesting. One can't have quite as little foresight as a river. I always know generally what I want to write about. But not the specific conclusions I want to reach; from paragraph to paragraph I let the ideas take their course.

So, what's interesting?

Surprises are things that you not only didn't know, but that contradict things you thought you knew. And so they're the most valuable sort of fact you can get. They're like a food that's not merely healthy, but counteracts the unhealthy effects of things you've already eaten.

This at least starts to address one of the questions I've been chewing on for a while--how to be interesting. I'm at least decent at it, but the web and the net are plagued by people who are want attention but don't know any pleasant way of getting it. Telling them about surpise might help and is kinder than asking them to come back when they can pass a Turing test.

Well, writing for the lj is already an education--I hadn't realized that writing anything interesting about T'ai Chi would be so difficult/not a default. While the sort of thing I've written could still be useful for me as practice and class notes, if T'ai Chi were as dull as I make it sound, I wouldn't have been doing it for 20-odd years.

Aside from doing more introspection and putting in more effort when I write and rereading some of my better T'ai Chi books (reviews will follow when I've got that amazon link set up--does anyone actually make money from those?) with attention to what they're actually doing, are there any lj's with substantive writing about T'ai Chi or other movement arts? Or good stuff about writing about hard-to-specify sensations?