25 months ago I stumbled across a book called The Screenwriter's Bible by David Trottier in the free box at a local bookstore. I took it home and it made a lot of sense! I had an idea for a screenplay back in the mid 1990s, but the only thing I had been able to write was the first sentence. Had no idea how to turn this germ of an idea into a screenplay until I devoured this guide.
About the same time I ran across a very useful deck of cards from at
www.FabulaDeck.com. Because the first book had been so helpful, I invested in this deck. I put 2-sided tape on them and affixed them to an empty wall. Think of the cards like a spreadsheet. The columns are the steps in Joseph Campbell's The Hero's Journey. The rows are either characters or key
items or locations in the story. I used the sticky-notes to jot down key
events or ideas and place them in that matrix. Part of what made it useful was the visual nature of the technique. I could see where I might have holes or maybe too much material. Part of its usefulness was I could see which characters were over/under represented in different parts of the story. And a big part of its usefulness was a set of questions that it provoked in my mind. As my mind found answers to them, I started filling in gaps. Over a 4 month period I sketched out a high level overview of the plot and got about 20 pages written in screenplay formatting. Things to keep in perspective - I learned two different tools, a new way of writing, and went from 1 sentence to 20 written pages. FYI, a two hour long movie needs a script that's about 120 pages long, so that's serious progress! Also found another highly useful book (out of many I discarded as not useful or too formulaic) called Screenwriting Unchained by Emmanuel Oberg. I'll note that other than the specifics of how to format a screenplay on the page, everything else in those
books was just as useful for
novels as it was for screenplays.
And then life thru us a detour. The Russians invaded Ukraine and millions of Ukrainians were now refugees. My wife and I decided we could help someone. But rather than get a random family who would move into our spare bedroom and wonder what to do with their lives, we decided to look for an artist who (a) already knew how to make a living selling their art on the internet or through galleries and (b) worked in one of the many art studios we have set up in our home. (Woodworking, woodturning, pottery, making jewelry, enamel art, or various textile arts. We're hobby and book sluts, don't judge us!)
We ended up with a world-class enamel artist moving in with us. (Enamel art takes finely ground up glass and heats it up until it melts and fuses to the metal it has been placed on.) Total blind luck enabled by dogged persistence to search thru the Facebook friends of friends of friends of friends of
the one Ukrainian artist I already knew. (When I contacted her first, she said she was at a neighbor a a Molotov cocktail making party for the Russians headed towards her
city. I figured she's an artist, she'll have artist friends.) So, when our guest arrived, I set aside my writing and focused on the enameling I could learn by working next to a world class artist. His name is Oleksii Koval, by the way.
www.oleksiikoval.com In particular I like his
Trees and Ukrainian Portrait series. But I digress (just a bit).
So, much of that year went by and on Halloween of 2022, I sent a write-up of what the main character in book 1 did a thousand years later during the
war of the ring. I had them ride with the
Dunedain who met up with
Aragorn after
Helm's Deep. It was a nice little two or three page entry written like the stories in the LOTR appendices. Pretty much just the facts of what happened to them and around them. Sent it to my son who observed that
Middle-earth was a big place and there was lots more going on during the War of the Ring, the main character was an
elf from
Lorien, so why not write what they did in Lorien during the war?
So on 1 November, I set out to do just that along with one really important mental breakthrough! I realized I wasn't writing a "novel", which is a very modern way of telling a story. I was writing a biography whose source material was composed of diaries, letters, annal entries, interviews,
tales and songs. Biographies don't have plots like novels do. Yet I've been fully enthralled by a good biography of a person who was involved in truly interesting situations - Churchill, Lincoln, Lawrence of Arabia, and Sydney Smith are great examples.
Plus, it was a story cycle in which a varying set of characters took part in different quests/tasks/events. Think the various tales of King Arthur and his knights. A common setting and some common characters, but in some tales they are just passing thru, in others they are the main protagonist (or antagonist). Rather than amalgamate these different tales into a traditional biographic text, I chose to present the translated source material directly to the reader and let them assess the raw (but translated) documents. It was very, very freeing!
I went back thru the LOTR timeline for everything that might have a bearing on Lorien.
Galadriel and
Celeborn knew who was in the fellowship and what they were up to BEFORE the fellowship arrived in Lorien. How did they know? I posited that someone carried a message from
Elrond to Galadriel after the fellowship members were chosen but before the fellowship left
Rivendell quite some time later. Had to be someone who could sneak or fight their way thru obstacles, possibly including the 9. They needed to already know what the fellowship was attempting because, otherwise, another person would need to be let in on what was the single most important secret of the Free
Peoples - even more fraught with peril than letting the Germans know when and where D-Day would be in France. It needed to be a verbal message because a written one could go astray. And their courage and loyalty to the guidelines put forward by the
Valar on
Eru's behalf needed to be without doubt.
Glorfindel seemed to be the obvious choice. So, the story in book 2 starts with his arrival in Lorien. I had plans but it turned out that some of the characters had their own plans, and one of them won out over mine.
Later, the fellowship arrived,
Legolas and
Gimli wandered about during the day, Legolas partied at night, and the fellowship left after awhile.
Gandalf showed up quite the worse for wear, recovered quickly, and went off to
Rohan on his own.
There were 4 military incursions into Lorien, 1 chasing the fellowship and three during the hostilities of open war. I had a lot of room for expanding on the info in the appendices!
And then, after the war, there's the trip to Edoras,
Minas Tirith, back to Edoras, on into Hollin, and then back over Caradhras to Lorien. The story in Book 2 ends a year and a day after Glorfindel arrived in Lorien bearing tidings of hope and dread. The appendices have selected entries out of the Annals of Lorien covering the departure of Galadriel and then Celeborn, the depopulation of the land as many
elves there cannot handle the passing of Time once Galadriel's ring loses its power, and the handing over of what remained to
Thranduil's rule.
Book 3 takes up the lives of the few surviving characters many
ages of the world later.
Book 1 predates the War of the RIng. It predominately covers circa 3A 1940 thru about 3A 2131 though flashbacks go back to the late 3A 1300s.
I guess that's a long way to go about saying, "I got some inspiration right after I found some very useful training, and since I could now make progress nearly on demand, that's what I chose to do!"