Tag Archives: Lord of the Rings

Balrogs … and “Less is More!”

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One artist’s depiction of the Balrog confronting Gandalf in “The Lord of the Rings” by J.R.R. Tolkien

Recently in my Tolkien Literature Reading Group, one of the members asked me what I, “as a writer,” thought about a certain scene in The Lord of the Rings. I think it was the scene where Gandalf confronts the Balrog in Moria. Tolkien simply says that the Balrog “was like a great shadow, in the middle of which was a dark form, of man-shape maybe, yet greater” with a mane, a sword, and wings. Gandalf defies it, claiming his status as “a servant of the Secret Fire, wielder of the flame of Anor.” Tolkien doesn’t bother to tell us what the source of this Secret Fire is nor what the flame of Anor is. Each reader is left to imagine the details of the Balrog; it was only in the various film interpretations of the LOTR that viewers were passively fed the Balrog’s details because film required the visual presentation of the Balrog in all its fearsome glory.

I realized that Tolkien, in that particular scene and in many others as well (once I thought about it), did not say nearly as much as most readers think he does in terms of description and detail. He writes JUST ENOUGH and then lets us — each reader — fill in the details. That way each of us is more invested in the scene, in what happens, and in what results come of it. We supply our own vision of beauty and ugliness, what is frightening or comforting, what propels or inhibits the characters.

Too often writers supply too much — too much description, too many motivations, too many words. We need to trust readers more to fill in these details themselves. We overwrite. We over-describe. We need to allow the reader(s) to contribute their own efforts to fill in the gaps and make the scene more compelling. All too often, this is what happens anyway: we can describe a character’s exact appearance, down to the last detail, but the reader will recreate them in whatever way seems appropriate to that reader in order to make the character “beautiful” or “sneaky” or whatever the character’s most important trait is. (I remember that I first read The Hobbit immediately after finishing The Wind in the Willows and I have always pictured Bilbo as a rather large frog wearing Victorian clothes in many scenes, simply another version of Mr. Toad.)

Allowing the reader to contribute to the scene not only makes the scene much more effective but helps us writers to become better writers as well. It might seem lazy to say less about a character or a scene but it actually forces us to be more thoughtful and concise. It makes us think about what is really important about the scene or character and drop anything extraneous.

THAT’S the hard part!

Define “Trilogy”

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Traitor to the Crown trilogy follows the adventures of colonial witches trying to help the American colonists by overthrowing the power of British witches who intend to crush George Washington and the colonial rebellion.

What is a “trilogy?” It seems that answering this question is harder than I thought. As I was working on Come Hell or High Water with my editor, I realized that there were two different ideas of what constitutes a “trilogy” and that each speaker may not even be aware that other participants in the conversation may be operating with another definition in mind.

One definition of “trilogy” is more like “series.” According to this definition, the trilogy is a series of 3 books that follow the adventures of a set of characters. Each book is a stand-alone novel and tells a story that is “all wrapped up” by the end of each book, though a larger arc will only be resolved at the end of the last book. The excellent Traitor to the Crown books, pictured above, are an example of this kind of trilogy. (You can read my review of these books here.)

The other definition of trilogy is that one story is broken up into 3 books and although each book can be read on its own, there is no real conclusion to the story until the end of the last book. The classic example of this kind of trilogy is The Lord of the Rings by J.R.R. Tolkien. He wrote one big novel and was told by his publisher that it had to be broken up into 3 books as it would not fit into one set of covers and there was a paper shortage in the UK at that time (due to WWII rationing). It was fairly easy to divide the novel as he had structured it as a series of “books” and so each installment of the “Lord of the Rings” contains two of the six books. This kind of trilogy is sometimes called a “serial,” as the story is released or published in installments. Each installment might tell a self-contained episode or two of the larger story but the real story is not concluded until the “grand finale” of the last installment.

When I wrote “Come Hell or High Water,” I also wrote one novel and was then told by the publisher that it would not fit between one set of covers. (This put me into the same company as Tolkien, which I thought was pretty good!) But my novel was not organized in the same way “The Lord of the Rings” was and so it was more difficult to divide into 3 installments.

The first thing my editor and I had to do was figure out, then, was how and where to divide the novel into thirds and how to slightly re-organize the story as a result of this division.

Luckily, there is no limit on how large the digital file for a eBook is, so the entire trilogy is available as a single eBook as well as 3 individual eBooks that match the 3 paperback books of the trilogy.