After each viewing of the Lord of the Rings extended editions, I exited the cinema feeling more myself than I had felt in years: excited to think about the stories and the unwritten or underwritten chapters that were only hinted about in the legendarium. It was the first time for a few friends to view the extended editions in their entirety — and for some, it was their first time viewing the films altogether. I’ve lived a life within these stories, and sharing what I knew (the little I remember) and how I felt, and what I loved was a revelation. Fear kept me in check for a long time (no one wants to hear this, this can only be interesting for me, don’t take up too much time to talk about this because someone else should have something more important to share!), fear still does. But in the hours following a screening, my friends’ questions and explicit excitement about the stories was wonderful to witness, and even more pleasurable to encourage. It is my hope that any novel I produce could also be the subject of a similar enthusiasm. So much of myself, I let lie still and prone and quiet, hoping I do not offend by being too loud, or too much. Talking about the Lord of the Rings in detail, with the express permission of my friends, was a novel experience — but I don’t want that to be the case permanently.
I struggle in my daily life to find the “correct opportunity” to talk about the work that matters to me, and the work I’m trying to do here (by myself, in the quiet). And I don’t know how to talk about this novel I’m grappling with and wrestling out of myself — not because the story is complicated, but because I am, simply, out of practice. As I worked through the current chapter for the novel, I found my concentration flagging, and I realized I needed a break, not from the writing, but from the story when my brain started to wander over to another project that I had set down. Fiction About My Father is a series of stories that live between fiction and nonfiction, where I give myself permission to write about what my life with my father would have been like if—
—if he had survived his heart attacks in 2018
–if he had survived the COVID-19 pandemic in 2020
–if he had survived long enough for me to drive him around, for once
For a few weeks, I drafted the second in that series (Where I Went In Your Car) until I hit another block, and I dove back into the 6th chapter of (Leatherbound Hands), a multi-chapter fanfic that I’ve been working on, centered around Éomer and Lothiriel. It’s a slow-burn romance wrapped up in a lot of magic and politics, where I give myself permission to think about Éomer in that period before Aragorn’s coronation, after Theoden’s death. How does a world post-Sauron work when it must still account for the ills of Sauron’s bid for dominance? I think through a specific question of migration in Middle Earth in the period just after a major conflict that unseated a powerful, imperial effort. If it is truly the Age of Men, then Éomer and Rohan would be at the forefront of confronting the fact that defeating Sauron does not make allies of all Men — and it does not remove the selfishness, nearsightedness, suspicion, and tendency towards violence that Men share. So I think through what that means for a nascent power like Rohan (led by a warrior) trying to understand peace, trying to build it, and what that means for power. Needless to say, I haven’t gotten to the romance quite yet, but I’ve enjoyed thinking things through in this way.
What has remained important to me is the idea of writing as a practice, prioritizing the process and the continuing effort to look for time to write in every day (evening the average for this even as I speak), regardless of the project, the rate of writing, or even the quality sometimes. Writer is a verb.
