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Lessons from Tolkien: How Creativity Flows From Who We Are
Caveat: I have a virgin understanding of this man, but let’s look at this.
So where does someone come up with a story like Lord of the Rings. This post isn’t going to completely answer that, but a simplistic answer can be pulled out of reading about J.R.R. Tolkien’s life. You see I always wonder where people get their big ideas. As if the process of coming up with them is something I cannot do. I want to know where they got them because maybe knowing will teach me how to create big ideas. How does someone create an entire world fitted with its own people, history, and language. How do you write and create something so in depth that you can talk about your characters and refer to how “history became legend, legend became myth, and for two and half thousand years the Ring passed out of all knowledge.”
A simple reading of Tolkien’s life sheds some light on where his story may have come from. Tolkien was a college educated man and professor at Oxford. He formed conversation groups where he spent time discussing ideas and hashing out theories about life. Tolkien had a love for languages and studied them extensively. Well before Bilbo Baggins was even an idea he was creating languages of his own. He later studied philology in college and would contribute to writing the English…
