The Hobbit wouldn't cut it in today's market!

Over at literary agent Nathan Bransford's blog, there's a funny guest post - a rejection letter written to J.R.R. Tolkien for his children's book, The Hobbit.

I'm afraid poor old Bilbo would have a hard time seeing the light of day in today's publishing atmosphere.

Yew trees and churchyards

Apparently many churchyards in England have yew trees growing in them. Some of the trees are much older than the churches, and some have obviously been planted there when, or after, the church was built, sometimes near a door, as in the picture below:


The religious/spiritual/ritual/sacred significance of the yew goes back beyond the advent of Christianity in England. Churches were sometimes built on sites that had pre-Christian sacred/spiritual significance, hence the presence of yews already.

The yew continued to signify a connection to those gone before us to the hereafter, and of death, but also of life everlasting - resurrection in Christian terms. So they were often purposely planted on church grounds.

This particular door with its yews is said to be the possible inspiration for the doors of Moria in Tolkien's The Lord of the Rings. It is found at the rear of a church in a small town in the Cotswolds, where Tolkien is said to have gone wandering and sketching. In Tolkien's version, however, the trees flanking the doors are ancient hollies.

An interesting aside, in the Harry Potter books, Voldemort's wand is made of yew wood (it dispenses death, yet its wielder seeks everlasting life), and Harry's wand is made of Holly - anciently thought to be a ward against evil.

Writing rules: Suspension of Disbelief. An exerpt from Tolkien's "On Fairy-stories."

For any writers out there, here's an interesting remark I came across while reading J.R.R. Tolkien's essay, On Fairy-stories:

"Children are capable, of course, of literary belief, when the story-maker's art is good enough to produce it. That state of mind has been called "willing suspension of disbelief." But this does not seem to me a good description of what happens. What really happens is that the story-maker proves a successful "sub-creator." He makes a Secondary World which your mind can enter. Inside it, what he relates is "true": it accords with the laws of that world. You therefore believe it, while you are, as it were, inside. The moment disbelief arises, the spell is broken; the magic, or rather art, has failed. You are then out in the Primary World again, looking at the little abortive Secondary World from outside. If you are obliged, by kindliness or circumstance, to stay, then disbelief must be suspended (or stifled), otherwise listening and looking would become intolerable. But this suspension of disbelief is a substitute for the genuine thing, a subterfuge we use when condescending to games or make-believe, or when trying ... to find what virtue we can in the work of an art that has for us failed."

We've all heard it before - don't mess with the reader. Don't break the rules of the world you're creating, and don't arbitrarily add new rules late in the game in order to try and make sense of what your characters are doing. We are not artists when we do that. We are merely finger-painters slopping colors without regard onto slick paper.

Tolkien knew the difference between belief and suspension of disbelief, and that's why he has such a legion of fans - they all believe.

Here's hoping that, as writers, we can become artful sub-creators and cast that unbreakable spell of belief in our reader's minds.