Tolkien’s 5 Tips for Creating Complex Heroes
Whew…read these tips culled from Roger Colby’s excellent blog on writing. He gives us J.R.R. Tolkien’s 5 tips on how to create a complex character. So relieved to know that Pia, the protagonist of my work-in-progress novel KRISHNA’S COUNSEL, is one helluva complex chick…who fortunately turns simple and profound in the end…
Originally posted on Writing Is Hard Work:
Tolkien’s letters are rich with information about J.R.R. Tolkien’s writing process. I wrote a post last week about Aragorn being Tolkien’s example of an epic hero, and someone posted: “But Frodo Baggins is the hero of the LOTR trilogy, right?” I would argue that he is not, but only one of three or four characters who together make a great hero for the epic story. Today I will focus on Frodo.
To begin this post, I thought I would pull a quote from a letter Tolkien wrote to his son Christopher on January 30th, 1945. In it, he discusses something quite interesting: “There are two quite different emotions: one that moves me supremely and I find small difficulty evoking: the heart-racking sense of the vanished past (best expressed by Gandalf’s words about the Palantir); and the other a more ‘ordinary’ emotion, triumph, pathos, tragedy of the characters. That I am learning to…
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