Having recently re-read Carpenter's biography of Tolkien, I keep thinking about how he often wrote or talked about discovering elements to his stories. For example, he would come up with a name for character in a story, and then he would say he had to "discover" where this person came from and what they were like, and so forth. He treated his stories as if there was a real history behind them, and he had to research and find out what that history told him. My past reaction to this method of "discovery" was simply that this was a verbal construct on his work of imagining. "I have to discover," meant "I'm going to go off and dream this stuff up." However, I have also recently been learning how the act of writing can lead to thoughts coming to us which may not have come to us otherwise. There is something about the connection between how our brains work and the act of putting pen to paper. I'm now wondering if this is connecte...
Mostly stuff on Christianity by an Anglican priest who reads a lot of C. S. Lewis. Please note: all my posts about Lewis' book How To Pray are on the cslewis.org site, under Social Media/blog.