Nostalgia for a story not yet told.

Reading Lord of the Rings was probably the most important influence on my life, not counting family and (possibly) my ten year bout with depression. That may sound like I'm overstating the case, but really--I own a bookstore and I am a writer because of Tolkien's creations. I met Linda in a writer's group. I've been chasing the feelings that book aroused in me my entire life.

It was the summer of either 1966 or 1967, so I was either 14 or 15 years old. My brother, Mike, was in a local production of The Fantasticks, so the soundtrack of that summer was the (off)Broadway album. To this day, the song Try to Remember gives rise to waves of nostalgia.

Try to remember the kind of September
When life was slow and oh, so mellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When grass was green and grain so yellow.
Try to remember the kind of September
When you were a young and callow fellow,
Try to remember and if you remember then follow.

Try to remember when life was so tender
That no one wept except the willow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That dreams were kept beside your pillow.
Try to remember when life was so tender
That love was an ember about to billow.
Try to remember and if you remember then follow.

Deep in December it's nice to remember… 

 

At the time, I didn't know how to articulate the feelings that LOTR's evoked. But looking back, it was an overwhelming sense of nostalgia for a time and place that never existed. When I turned to writing in my early twenties, there was little modern fantasy to be found on the bookshelves.  As hard as that is to believe. (I won't get into the thickets as to what is modern fantasy and what isn't--just to say, nothing scratched my Hobbit itch). There was about a five year gap between the uncountable times I read LOTR's and when other fantasies started coming out. 

So I set out to recapture that feeling in my own books. By the time Star Axe, Snowcastles, and Icetowers were published, there were plenty of fantasies, but I'd done my best. If the books were a bit derivative of LOTR's, that was purely intentional. (Though I tried to avoid using elves and dwarves and such.)

I married Linda and bought the store and that was the end of my writing for 25 years. 

To my great surprise, when I came back to writing, it wasn't to write fantasy. I wanted to avoid the traps I'd fallen into in my previous attempts. I tried to write stuff that wasn't quite so familiar to me. It was a challenge to tell a story well without resorting to nostalgia. 

But always, in the back of my mind, I planned on someday trying to write an Epic Fantasy Trilogy. 

I've taken a few months off from writing. I'm ready to get going again. When I was going to sleep last night, I realized that I want to capture the nostalgia of LOTR's again. I want to capture the nostalgia of a book not yet written. Which is weird, but I intuitively sense that's what I'm after. 

But how do I do that without copying the elements of the books that evoked those feelings? One of the reasons I've avoided fantasy (mostly) is because the elements of Epic Fantasy are pretty much set in stone. If you try too hard to avoid the tropes, you end up writing something contrary for its own sake or a different genre altogether. I have personally stopped reading most epic fantasies. Only a few authors have managed to pull it off to my satisfaction. (Martin, Rothfuss, Bujold.)

 

Nevertheless, inside me is that deep well of nostalgia that I can summon at any time. My goal is to use that feeling to create something new. If that is possible. I'm hoping to avoid the traps that seem to develop each time I try to do that. Combine the craftsmanship I've learned over the last few years and the feelings of longing that is constantly there. 

 

I'll probably fall short, but hopefully some of that nostalgia will come through. We'll see. I always think I'm going to write one thing, and then another thing comes along. 

But that nostalgia for a story not yet told is as strong as ever.