Tom the Oldest

Tom Bombadil is a being so powerful and strange that even his creator did not know what to make of him. 

 

While fans and scholars have speculated and disputed his nature, they neglect to consider that the man who discovered was himself wise enough to refrain from doing so. Tolkien respected the mysterious nature of Tom Bombadil. He did not fret with Tom but simply left him be in his corner of Middle Earth, a corner which by Tom's mere presence is perhaps the most unusual and miraculous of that map. 

 

Since I am rather well-read in Middle Earth lore, casual Tolkien fans sometimes ask me if I know who or what Tom Bombadil is. But in all my years of enjoying Tolkien's lore I have never found an explanation concerning Tom Bombadil that satisfied me, but one. 

 

 

It seemed a fact not worth mentioning that the character of Tom Bombadil was inspired by a Dutch doll that belonged to one of Tolkien's children. While this may go so far as to explain some of the very specific and colorful attire Tom is known for wearing, such as his yellow boots, as well as Tom's carefree and almost childish nature, it does not at first glance say much else about the ancient figure; till you learn that Tolkien used to tell his children stories about that doll.

 

While reading Tom's own songs about skipping through the trees and along river beds, one can almost picture Tolkien bent over his children's beds, the shadow of the doll cast across the bedroom wall as he animated it with his hands and his voice, bringing it to life with his stories. 

 

Tolkien told his children stories long before he ever actually completed writing one that satisfied him; and so, one can know with certainty that Tom came along long before Bilbo or Hùrin, or even Gandalf. 

These were only shadows cast big and small, vague impressions in Tolkien's mind left by the lore he loved and the legends he read. Names of characters he later wrote about can be found in obscure Norse fragments we know Tolkien used to study. Images resembling Tolkien's own line some of the Fairie realms he once dwelt in.

 

But Tom Bombadil was there, real, tangible, childish, put forth with the easy flow of a narrative told for one's own children, living up only to their whimsical standards, and not Tolkien's own. Tom offers us a glimpse into what those stories might have been like, there in the bedrooms of his children when he did not burden himself with self-doubt and a work beyond imagining in the course of an evening. 

It is strange that something that at first seems so easy should puzzle readers for so very long. Tolkien did not wish to understand Tom Bombadil. Indeed, while most everything else about Middle Earth is rich with history and thought, Tom Bombadil exists outside of that, he escapes that, in more ways than one.

We must decide that Tom Bombadil must simply be left be. 

 

 

 

In the end, the only thing that has ever made any amount of sense to me about Tom Bombadil was what Gandalf says about him. At the Council of Elrond, he tells that Tom "is oldest." 

Tom is older than Middle Earth both inside Tolkien's works and outside of it. Indeed, out of all the vivid faces and scenes that linger when I reflect on all I have loved in Middle Earth, I know Tom Bombadil has been around the longest. He was around long before any of Middle Earth's histories were written, for he lived outside of them once. He knew Tolkien before he was weighted by success and immense writings.

I know only that Tom Bombadil is so ancient that the only origin I have ever traced of him in all my Middle Earth wanderings is the curious and puzzling figure of a Dutch doll in yellow boots. And where that came from, none but Tolkien need ever know. Though I greatly doubt that he himself would have been able to remember. 

The Dark Lord of Depression in Sanderson's "Mistborn"

(While I try to refrain from discussing plot points specifically, spoilers lie beyond this point. Please, go no further if you do not wish to uncover the plot of the first Mistborn novel!)

 

I discovered fantasy writer Brandon Sanderson in the ninth grade by route of the Mistborn trilogy. Back then I spent many a lunch hour perusing the shelves of the library, pulling out book after book and imagining that perhaps someday I might read them all. 

So, on one dark and fateful day, I pulled a paperback off the bottom shelf and was immediately intrigued.

 

I remember it was the cover that first attracted me to the book. On it Vin (the protagonist) is truly a force to behold, the look in her eye can tell you that much. She is young, intelligent, fierce, and beautiful, and extremely powerful.

 

While I certainly wasn't new to fantasy at the time, having read The Lord of the Rings two years prior as well as The Inheritance Cycle, this was the first book of this variety that I had ever read. It was Sanderson that made me realize that The Inheritance Cycle wasn't nearly as good as I had once believed. It merely offered a good medium, a stepping stone from children's fairy tales and young adult adventures to the epic and more adult fantasy genre. 

One can credit Tolkien with effectively reinventing the legendary and truly terrible Dark Lord, pulling them straight out of old epics, the dark seas where they had so long lain comatose, and reawakening them into the fantasy genre. Christopher Paolini certainly gave it a good try. But it was Sanderson, I believe, who left us with a Dark Lord of truly devastating disposition. Little more than a shadow for most of the tale, Sanderson's Dark Lord lingers like an overpowering presence from the story's dark beginning. 

 

I must admit, reading Mistborn for the first time was an utterly overwhelming experience. While I had been familiar with The Lord of the Rings prior to reading it, it being like a family heirloom in our household, Mistborn was wildly unknown and totally alien. I had no idea what to expect of it. The complexity of Sanderson's magic systems was fully new to me, as was this style of world building. It was, at the time, astoundingly staggering.

These feelings of suffocation served the plot remarkably well. The sense that I was engulfed in this new dark world made it that much more effective and terrifying. I felt like Vin, a girl in front of a hugely hopeless task, the scale of which I had never seen surmounted and had no reason to believe could succeed.

I confess, some of the images the book gave me still haunt me, though I did not realize it until I recognized its shadows in my own mist-filled fictions. The sickening pollution of a world in which skies rain ash; the cruel light of a harsh red sun; the suffocating mists permeated by peasant's superstitions, inhabited by corpse harvesting monsters: I could practically smell the stench and spoliation. It felt sickening and overwhelmingly heavy in a way that made it hard to breathe. I remember feeling my skin crawl when the spike pierced head of an Inquisitor turned in Vin's direction. I remember feeling bereaved and disturbed when the once familiar face of the contemplative and dependable brother returned to us at the end of the book, his eyes pierced inside his skull. 

I remember all these things like one remembers the stench of a place even after one leaves it. Most of all, I remember the cloud of depression that came with it. 

 

It has been almost ten years since my first reading of the trilogy, and a reread has been a long time coming. The series holds up incredibly, and though I had long believed that The Stormlight Archive was my favourite of Sanderson's series, now I am no longer so sure. 

 

Mistborn has been with me longer, after all. The images have stayed with me from the ninth grade and on. I remember them so much more vividly than the plot itself, just like I remember the feeling of despair that oozes like a black fog from between its pages. 

The book describes this feeling subtly, incorporating it into the details of the world and the suffering in the backdrops; until, that is, the Lord Ruler shows up. It is by his presence that one begins to suspect exactly where this feeling of hopelessness and depression comes from. The Lord Ruler, an immortal emperor who has ruled, polluted, and impoverished this world for hundreds of years, uses his unquenchable powers in Allomancy to suppress anyone near him. His haunting and imposing keep sits over the city, the very shadow of depression, forcing all to be submissive under his despotism. He is the source of their devastation, and thus, it bleeds out from the book, stark and black!

This feeling was so consistent and horrifying throughout the book that it lingered and could be brought up by the mere thought of the novel even long after I had read it. Years later I heard Sanderson compare Mistborn to a version of The Lord of the Rings in which Frodo comes to Mordor, tired, broken, and devastated by his burden, only to find Dark Lord waiting for him at the gates, thanking him for bringing the ring all this way to him. I could not help but laugh, but not because it was funny; only because it was true. Deep down, the hopelessness and manipulation of it still disturbed me. 

Why did you think you could ever succeed, these words suggest. 

I can still hear the Lord Ruler's voice hissing pitifully: You don't know what I do for mankind. I (am) your god...

 

Having now finished rereading the first of the Mistborn books,  something came to me: an idea that served to add an even greater sense of tragedy to an already dark book. 

Before the end, the novel offers us an explanation for the Lord Ruler's extreme power, saying he had the source of both Allomancy and a Feruchemist at his disposal. This, the book explains, is how he had stayed young for so many years, for by storing his youth and his strength in his metals and later burning it, he could use those to the extreme, exaggerating them to the point of exhaustion. Indeed, the image of the Lord Ruler in his old and frail form is no less vivid to me than the young handsome man who arrives to attend mass executions in a black carriage, dressed in black, serving death to hundreds without a flinch. 

 

One is reminded of the effects of the One Ring, which stretches one out till one becomes a horror, a shadow of one's old self. In the same way, the Lord Ruler's powers eat away at him, harvesting from his human flaws of aging and weakness, taking from his fatal feelings and stretching them out into vast, horrid shapes. 

It was only on my second read through that I looked past this shadow of despair and depression and saw another sad form behind the Lord Ruler's black figure. 

 

 

The book doesn't explain the Lord Ruler's overwhelming ability to bring feelings of depravity upon hundreds of people, managing even to pierce those who are meant to be resistant to those forces. He manages to soothe entire crowds into feelings of misery and hopelessness. Yet the explanation is there, beneath the surface of the Lord Ruler's horrid disposition and Sazed's uncertain words: for if things like knowledge, and sight, and age can be stored and burnt and harvested, can depression not be also? 

Why not tether your own despondency to your stores; shackle it to your metals and burn them like a power; thrust them out across your subjects to subdue them; dish out your own despair so you can suffocate them in your misery; suppress them under the weight of your own sorrow.

I cannot say that I have forgotten about corpse-devouring mistwraiths and cold men with metal for eyes, but another image lingers now as I finish reading Mistborn for the second time: that of a dark castle over an ash covered city, its people retching on pollution and poverty, submissive in its shadow; and locked away inside this haunted keep, gone from sight and knowledge, an immortal lord deemed god sits in his tower, binding his own despair into vast stores, enough to depress and rule a world for generations. 

 

Inevitably, I leave this world now feeling no less overpowered than I did before. I only understand it better.

Why Tolkien Left Middle-Earth

Wisdom From Gandalf on the Nature of Stories

"It has been brought forth and must now go its appointed way in the world, though naturally I take a deep interest in its fortunes, as a parent would of a child. I am comforted to know that it has good friends to defend it against the malice of its enemies."

~Tolkien on The Lord of the Rings

 

In a letter that Tolkien may have never actually sent, he recounted a peculiar conversation he once had with a man at Oxford whose name he had forgotten.

He could recall little else about the gentlemen of mystery other than that he was well known, though ill-remembered by Tolkien later on, despite the interesting conversation he shared with him.

This conversation took place somewhere neigh twenty years after the publication of The Lord of the Rings. Though the exact date of it is unknown, it was by it that Tolkien believed to have discovered the answer to a well-worn question of his. Remarkably, the answer was, as Tolkien later recalls, offered to him as if by Gandalf himself! 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

(some things), Tolkien claimed "may explain to some extent why it (The Lord of the Rings) 'feels' like a history; why it was accepted for publication; and why it has proved readable for a large number of different kinds of people... It does not fully explain what has actually happened."

What a strange question. Yet to be sure the answer cannot be horribly simplified by the simpleminded, one should note that Tolkien was not asking about the logistical explanation for his success. 

When a reader asks a similar question of the author (namely how a work was created? or where its inspiration came from?) it does not seem to the inquirer nearly as large a question. The word why is not used, after all, and questions that deal in where and how usually seem far more traceable than the the large untraceable why.

A great many readers did ask this of Tolkien. Questions like "where did your inspiration come from?" or "how did you come with these ideas" plagued him. As a younger man he took the time to explain the mystery of his discovery of Middle-Earth. As he got older, he had little patience for it.

But naturally, when the writer doesn't supply a suitable answer, the reader will try to solve the mystery themselves. Usually they will seek to do this in small ways, like examining the things they encounter that remind them of the work (such as other works of art), or inspecting the authors lives, both of which Tolkien hated. Some inquirers were more persistent, however. Many wrote to Tolkien, asking him for answers. Some were lucky enough to interview him.

Yet when the man whose name Tolkien could remember asked him a similar question (though greatly disguised by his words) Tolkien was suddenly and expectantly given an answer by someone whom one might suppose far wiser than he himself: namely, Gandalf. 

"I think I can now guess what Gandalf would reply...", Tolkien wrote. For just as Tolkien dismissed the inquiry, the mysterious gentleman fell silent, and stared "fixedly" and said, in a voice much like Gandalf's,

"Of course you don't suppose, do you, that you wrote all that book yourself?"

"Pure Gandalf!", Tolkien states.

And then, being well familiar with Gandalf and his ways, he considered his answer.

"I was too well exposed with G. to expose myself rashly, or to ask what he meant. I think I said: 'No, I don't suppose so any longer.'"

All in all, the conversation echoes of Gandalf's advice to Frodo. His words to Frodo in the Mines of Moria are not so different, in a way. No one can put one in one's place quite so simply and thoroughly as Gandalf, whether that be to put one back where one belongs, or bring one forth and out onto the greater way.

'I wish the Ring had never come to me. I wish none of this had happened.'
Gandalf: 'So do all who live to see such times, but that is not for them to decide. All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given to us. There are other forces at work in this world, Frodo, besides that of evil. Bilbo was meant to find the Ring, in which case you were also meant to have it. And that is an encouraging thought.”

One cannot help but feel that Tolkien was likewise meant to find Middle-Earth and all that happened in it. (He always said that Middle-Earth was his discovery, not his invention.)

One could say a great deal about why Tolkien's creation has remained so astounedly successful. (I know I could). But perhaps that has little to with Tolkien himself and much more to do with those that aided him in its creation. C.S. Lewis and his youngest son Christopher Tolkien certainly come to mind.

But maybe it wouldn't be so crazy to say that Gandalf helped a little too.

One can easily chuckle about this notion. But it is, after all, a strange relationship an author has with their characters. They are not really "theirs", nor are they fully of them. Even those that resemble the author (as Tolkien claimed Faramir did) are not really theirs to keep.

The author has them only for a time, like a friend that they know and love for a short while who will one day move away. The author may at times wonder how that friend is doing, they might even consider writing to them, but it is unlikely that they ever will. 

Their characters have passed into the Grey Havens, a place only attainable from afar. One may catch glimpses of that distant shore, but neither reader nor writer will ever walk there in this lifetime. The pages of a book work the same way for us as the roundness of the earth does for the worlds of men: the best we can do is go back to where we started, travel round the globe, go there and back again, and start anew.

Eventually the author must let go of their characters. This is an inevitable truth. Even those that refuse to do so will eventually find that their characters are not the same; that they are less alive than they once were. Indeed, many writers suddenly find that they are unable to write about their characters. It is as if they aren't there anymore, living in the hole where they once dwelt; all that remains are the writer's memories of them and what they might have said or done in a given situation. But the story is over, and its characters, like its author, must move on eventually.

Many wise authors have abandoned sequels to their great works. Thus, their story ends well and its characters are allowed to retire (whether they pass into death and legend, or to have untold adventures on the road that goes ever on). And so, Bilbo walks down the road to Rivendell at the start of The Fellowship of the Ring, and not even Tolkien was able to follow.

In the same letter in which he recounted this conversation, Tolkien, in words that seem to rekindle Bilbo's own narrative tone, wrote that

"Looking back on the wholly unexpected things that have followed its publication ... I feel as if an ever darkening sky over our present world has been suddenly pierced, the clouds rolled back, and an almost forgotten sunlight had poured down again. As if indeed the horns of Hope had been heard again, as Pippin heard them suddenly."

And that is where the author stays, eventually: retired into the routine of their own life with abundant memories of their adventures, now behind them. His letters reveal just how often Tolkien would return to his memories of Middle-Earth, in one way or another, reminiscing about the events of his works like once lived adventures he had been fortunate enough to witness.

After all, Tolkien knew well that

"The L.R. (The Lord of the Rings) does not belong to me."

If it had, he may have stayed there forever; might have returned there often to walk in its hills or have tea with Bilbo. Indeed, one would like to think he could. But Bilbo doesn't live in Bag End anymore. 

What a sad thought this is. And yet, if one really thinks about it, one cannot help but feel that it is better this way. For all great adventures end eventually. It is only so that new adventures can be had, and a new Hobbit can come to live at Bag End. As Tolkien wrote long before his journey through Middle-Earth was over,

"So comes snow after fire, and even dragons have their endings."

(The Hobbit)

 

 

It was by discovering Middle-Earth that a desire was in me awakened to write and to create things that likewise arouse such fondness in others. (How marvelous it is to be fond of a place that one can carry in one's bag, in one's mind, and in one's heart! Only books can fit worlds in such little spaces; can cram worlds to explore and get lost in into words, and keep hearths to sit by and call home into paper!)

But reading Tolkien's letters has reminded me that all things have to end. Books always run out of pages sooner or later. That is the nature of things. But it is both a sadness and a blessing. For it is only in ending that they can become fond memories.

 

 

 

 

I may still be in the midst of my own adventure. And while I think often of the day when I can look back on all that I have said and done with fondness, I cannot forget to take the time to enjoy the journey for all the joys and struggles that it still has to offer me.

Even Tolkien had to leave Middle-Earth eventually, after all. But I am not yet ready to leave mine.

My book will run its course one day, and then the words will leave me. I may write about other things, but nothing will ever again be written about the realm I once knew and walked. Even an author can overstay their welcome in their world.

For now, I know that at least that it is not ready to leave me. There is much still to discover, and I am not finished with it yet.

 

On goes the road, as ever and always old stories continue to give way to new ones.

Another Year of Bilbo Baggins

It has been a busy few weeks, as the weeks of September never fail to be. But in all the new things that are only just beginning, and all the old things we are returning to, it is important to celebrate the ancient traditions, like the birthday of a likewise ancient Hobbit.

Indeed, of all the reasons to eat good food, drink cheap ale, watch one of our favorite movies, and just have fellowship with one another, in our books, the celebration of Bilbo Baggins birthday is one of the best. 

 

To another year.

Tolkien, Trees, and other Thoughts

I got distracted by the light dancing across my book as I was reading The Letters of J.R.R. Tolkien this afternoon.

I love the tree outside my bedroom window, almost as much as I love reading in the afternoon. I love sleeping with the window open so I can listen to the hush of the leaves in the night. I greatly enjoy all the little critters that visit me outside my window, from the birds that come to sing in the morning, to the family of squirrels that sometimes come to gawk at my cat. It is also my favorite place to take a nap, there in the tree filtered afternoon-sun.

Tolkien was himself a great lover of trees. Thus, it is no small wonder that The Lord of the Rings pays such special attention to them. Indeed, the trees are the personality of most every landscape in Middle Earth, be they of the hostile or illustrious variety. They are the constant dwellers, watching over passersby and temporary inhabitants that come and go throughout the years, such a short while in the long life of a tree.

Tolkien himself had a tree outside his window once which he claimed helped inspire his story Leaf by Niggle, an odd and wonderful tale that feels altogether dreamlike. He wrote about this tree in the books original introductory note, saying

"One of (the tale's) sources was a great-limbed popular tree that I could see even lying in bed. It was suddenly lopped and mutilated by its owner. I do not know why. It is cut down now, a less barbarous punishment for any crimes it may have been accused of, such as being large or alive. I do not think that it had any friends, or any mourners, except myself and a pair of owls."

Altogether, leafing through these letters written by a mentor that I will never get to meet has been wonderful, even more so than I expected.

Reading through his rambles –regarding such themes as the struggles of procrastination in the face of productivity, his constant anguish at the regrettable busyness of his schedule, and the woe brought on by a book that doesn't want to get done, have all made me realize that maybe I know what I'm doing after all. Self-doubt is no stranger to even the greats.

I sometimes feel small in comparison, so un-heightened by time, so stuck in the scope of the present with a book that is only as old as the files containing it on my computer; a book that is still so unlived in. But knowing that someone I so admire has struggled with the same things as I am toiling with now brings me an unexpected sort of comfort. All this is mostly normal, after all; as normal as the life of anyone who takes up writing can ever be.

Tolkien barely dared dream that so many would share in his delight for his Middle Earth.

Books are wrought only with great pain and frustration, for the imagination rarely complies well with the limits of our vocabulary and the hampered frame of the page.

But once the wrestling is through, and the writer sits back and cries in wonder and fear at what they have created, the book becomes severed from them. As Tolkien wrote:

"(The) goal was reached at last. It is finished... (but) now I look at it, the magnitude of my disaster is apparent to me. My work has escaped my control, and I have produced a monster."

Sometimes the book fades away after that, collecting dust on a back shelf, thought about from time to time only by they that sired it, sometimes with fondness, sometimes with regret. But every so often, if chance allows, a book will fly away to other horizons, where it finds other shelves, from that of a publisher, to possibly that of a reader.

Who can ever know for certain how many shelves a book can make a home in, nestled in comfortably, as if it's already forgotten they that toiled for it before it could stand up on its own. But, the writer won't know: not where it goes, nor how shelves it comes home to; much less how many readers might find a semblance of home in reading it.

Indeed, no one can ever truly guess what might happen when you release a wild book onto the vast world.

For now though, it is much nicer to simply read under the shadow of a tree, and dream of the day when my own book will forget about me and find a home on the shelf of another.

Running Away with Fictional People: Writing Advice to Take you Off the Beaten Path

What to do When your Characters Don't Want What you Want

I read a quote once that stuck with me. I cannot for the life of me trace it, but this is the line as best as I remember it.

"I can't stop reading. The characters might do something without me."

This little line never fails to make me smile, for it perfectly captures the excitement of reading a good character driven story; of running off with fictional friends; of having grand adventures with a band of fanciful troublemakers, painting fences, or seeking treasures; sleeping in hay-stacks with wandering orphans; chasing characters who chase rabbits down holes, or crawling after them through little doors. In these situations, I don't mind feeling like the quiet friend in the bunch. In fact, there is never a better time to be the quiet friend, because everyone knows that the reader is the protagonist's closest and most reliable friend, usually being the one that follows the protagonist most closely, (till the pages end, that is).

But there's more to this simple line, where ever it comes from. It doesn't just capture the thrill of being a reader. It also encapsulates something I believe firmly about writing. In short, it suggests that characters can all too easily get away from us, go on without us, and undergo adventures or shenanigans long after the book is closed, the lights out, and the reader sleeping. 

 

Yet, while this idea is a thrill to the reader, it can keep a writer up at night. Indeed, the writer is in much closer association with the character than the reader that will later come to know them. For the writer, it can feel a bit as if the character is asking them if they can come out to play, or rather, pestering them with questions in the hope that the writer can explain their existence. Why did I have to do that? Why are we going there? What's the point of all this? Where is this story going? –These are the types of questions I imagine the character might be asking. But, of course, it isn't the character that is asking these things at all, but I, myself, the writer, the one spinning the character into their paper existence. Furthermore, the reason I am asking myself these questions is likely because I doubt the character's existence; doubt that they are in fact believable; that their actions make sense; or that they will feel real enough to the reader. It is a constant worry for any writer that their characters don't feel convincing enough, and frankly, it would be a great insult to hear that they were not.

I am fond of my characters, as any writer is. And I have come to be rather fond of these late night conversations with my characters, even if they often result in sleepless nights, in many ons and offs of the nightlight, and many quick scribbled notes, brief lines of dialog or descriptions of body language I do not want to forget in my sleep. I have come to enjoy these nights for the simple fact that I rarely get such one on one time with my characters; times in which I remove myself from the voice my narrator speaks in and start thinking in my own; start looking at my creation from the perspective of me, the life that created it. And, ironically, it is these late nights in which my characters keep me awake with the doubt that they are not real enough that my characters seem most alive to me.

I can honestly say that my wrestling with my characters does not go beyond these nights, and when the words and the rain comes, my characters take over the page. It is then that I feel a thrill like no venture as a reader as ever given me, for nothing will ever be quite as risky and as wonderful as setting a character free on the page and letting them do just what they want.

I have often heard the writely advice that a writer should control their characters, and while I understand the reasoning behind this, I cannot say that I agree.

In writing about fictional people (if that is something you have ever done, you will know what I mean), you will often find that your characters will try to get away from you. "My characters don't want to do what I want them to do," goes the complaint.

To this the sensible writer will say something like "What do you mean, they don't want? You created them, didn't you? Your characters will want what you want them to want." This is fine advice, over all.

It is, in fact, a logical argument. But the argumentative side of whether you should wrestle with your characters by editing out the parts of them that defy you and your vision for the plot is beside the point. What you should really ask yourself is this: What kind of story are you really writing? Are you writing about people, or about situations; about personality, or plot? If your characters aren't enacting the plot the way you imagined they would, maybe there's a reason for that. Maybe you should go with it. It is the character driven plot, with all its curious children and never-yielding tricksters that makes readers feel like they're adventuring with a friend, as the quote above suggested. Readers, after all, love to read about people, about fictional personalities, both grand and wonderfully simple (think of any Hobbit you ever met). When a character makes decisions which have been forced onto them by the writer, the reader can always tell because the reader is themselves a person; and when a heart tugs at you or a curiosity probes your mind we can rarely ignore it.

Ultimately, there is a very simple reason for this. We humans, while still capable of intense logic, are at the core of our being creatures of wants, of dreams, of desires. That's why history, both real and mythological, is full of people falling prone to the illogical sides of themselves; making mistakes because of it; wheeling in mysteriously gifted horses through our gates; ringing bells to awake long-sleeping witches; eating forbidden fruits; kissing sorceresses; crawling over walls to break into locked-up keeps. Characters, like people, make irrational decisions. And while I am not arguing that you should allow irrationality to rule the plot, I believe nonetheless, and very firmly, that a wonderful and wild story is created when we allow our characters to make these decisions, even if they are irrational or inconvenient to the narrator.

Consider, for example, Tolkien's Lord of the Rings. This is undoubtedly one of the most famous fictional epics of all time, and it was written because a man (namely, Tolkien) followed a Hobbit out of the Shire totally unknowing what he would find outside its borders. I myself am convinced that if Tolkien hadn't set his protagonist free from his outline and the plot's expectations Frodo would still be named Bingo and the world would have lost one of its biggest fictional adventures ever put to the page.

Maybe my advice to you is simply to write like Tolkien. Because, although the edits later on might be extensive, I believe the most unpredictable and unexpected stories occur when not even the writer can foresee exactly what lies ahead. Yes, this may be risky, maybe it's even dangerous. But you can't have adventure without a little danger. And, if you're one of those writers who writes because they first loved to read, then write like you love to read. Don't just take a reader on a journey. Go on a journey yourself. Even if you know the destination, or plan to make a few stops along the way, at least be daring enough to be curious, to run off from the charted course, to explore un-plotted territory.

What it comes down to is this: If your characters are trying to run away from you, maybe you should let them. You never know where they might take you. After all, what more could a writer want than to write about characters that actually have wants of their own.