Tolkien’s 10 Tips for Writers

A wishful image on my part. My hope is that Tolkien would be proud of this offering, and would agree.

I wrote the following post on my old blog “Writing Is Hard Work” on 4/29/12. The post has been plagiarized a few times, once by Essaymama (a site where people can buy essays and turn them in as their own). It is my most popular post ever. I spent a good 10 hours perusing Tolkien’s letters to figure out what he might have thought about writing, and apparently found some gems. I’m posting it here again on Medium so that writers who read this site will find it and hopefully learn a few things. Enjoy!

I have long been a fan of J.R.R. Tolkien. Every year, when school dismisses for summer break, I read The Lord of the Rings. This year I will read it to my children and do all the voices for them. Tolkien was a brilliant writer, but what if we could sit down with him and ask him any question we wanted? What if he could give writers advice about their own writing from his years of experience as an incredible storyteller?

This is possible if we read his letters. I have a musty old book entitled The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien, edited by Humphrey Carpenter. I once spent the better part of a month reading it cover to cover and underlining every instance where the master of Middle Earth wrote about his process. What follows are the best of those notes:

1. Vanity Is Useless — Tolkien writes in a letter to Sir Stanley Unwin on 31 July 1947 “…I certainly hope…