Two Sundays ago, I went to a movie theater to see The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King. It was great fun watching it on the big screen. I’m now reading The Hobbit and The Lord of the Rings trilogy, and wondered how J. R. R. Tolkien wrote the books without a computer.
Keeping track of the story
My latest series, The Devil Particle series, has one storyline over four books. Each subsequent book begins with the scene that ended the book before it. The first novel starts on Monday, May 21, 2063 and ends on Sunday, August 5th, 2063, with an epilogue that’s five years later.
There’s a lot of ground to cover in such a short amount of time. And I have to keep straight so many details, like when the Devlins adopt their mutt Crook, what Gaige packed in his backpack before escaping to the mountains, or where exactly President Cicero was when the bomb that killed her family exploded.
Thankfully, I use a software program called Scrivener to organize my work and have a detailed timeline of events that begins 60 years before the book started. There’s an “extras” file with every deleted scene, and more times than not I use those scenes, just not in their original spots. I’ve cut and pasted so many times it’s dizzying. I don’t know how I’d write these books if I didn’t have a computer. So how did Tolkien do it?
Tolkien was a pantser like me
The Hobbit was published in 1937, and about that time Tolkien began work on The Lord of the Rings, which was published almost twenty years later in 1954-1955. Publication was delayed, in part, because Tolkien created 100-page appendices which laid out the language, family trees, character arcs, and more, and he insisted they were crucial to the books. The original manuscripts for the trilogy are over 9,250 pages long.
He must have plotted it all out, right? Nope, Tolkien was a pantser like me.
What the heck is a panster? Someone who writes from the seat of their pants as opposed to someone who plots the story first and then writes it. I love this quote from Wikipedia, “The Tolkien scholar Tom Shippey comments that ‘what is bound to surprise anyone familiar with The Lord of the Rings who then reads Tolkien’s early drafts in The Return of the Shadow is quite how little Tolkien had in the way of a plan, or even of a conception.'”
Tolkien also created maps, drawings, and his own language, which helped spur his imagination.
The brain of a writer
There were years when Tolkien didn’t work on the novels, but, as writers know, that doesn’t mean he wasn’t working through the story. Once authors start the creative process, our brains keep at it—in the shower, on the road, going for walks—basically any place we don’t have a pen and paper handy. I think this must have been the case with Tolkien too.
“Tolkien stated in a note to a letter that the 3:4 ‘Treebeard’ chapter ‘was written off more or less as it stands… almost like reading someone else’s work.’ The chapter seemed almost, in Christopher Tolkien’s words, to ‘write itself’. 6:2 ‘The Land of Shadow’ was likewise drafted ‘swiftly and in a single burst of writing’. 6:3 ‘Mount Doom’ was drafted in the same manuscript, directly without any preceding rough sketches; Christopher Tolkien suggests that his father’s ‘long thought’ about the destruction of the Ring allowed him to write the chapter ‘more quickly and surely than almost any earlier chapter’.” – Wikipedia
This has happened to me as well. Most recently, I thought through a pivotal scene for my antagonist and wrote it on the page fully formed.
I’ve finished The Devil Particle Series!
I finished the latest and best draft of The Renegade – The Devil Particle Series Book Four — eight years sooner than Tolkien finished his series (but also 8,000 words less). I’ve sent the last manuscript to my five critical readers and am looking forward to getting their comments back in a month. My goal is to publish The Runner this year and The Renegade early next year. I’m excited to get these stories out to you!
The Lord of the Rings manuscripts are in Milwaukee!
This March and September, you can see the original Lord of the Rings manuscripts at the J. R. R. Tolkien Collection at Marquette University in Milwaukee. The event is The J. R. R. Tolkien Manuscripts: Public Showings 2026, Marquette University, and is free, but you have to get a ticket to reserve your spot. Tickets are available a month before the showings.
