J.R.R. Tolkien started out creating his own languages as a kid. over time, he realized that language is inextricably tied to culture & history, and so, to truly create a new language, he would have to write the history of the people who spoke it thus began the Silmarillion, the mythological backstory for his invented Quenya language. he worked on that for many years, while also writing various other stories. one such story started with a line that popped all of a sudden into his head: "in a hole in the ground there lived a hobbit" the Hobbit was initially unrelated to Silmarillion, but over time, the worlds came together. then, after the Hobbit's success, Tolkien began work on a sequel, which quickly began to widen in scope, and shift into something much more ambitious... giving us the Lord of the Rings one thing that concerns me is all "the Lord of the Ring that might have been". for Tolkien to arrive at LOTR was a continual unfolding, poking at little bits of curiosity and allowing threads to weave together it is very different from a goal-oriented, "I am going to write a fantasy epic", ambition-driven approach. every step on the way to LOTR was a natural progression of the previous step, a gradual evolution... but often with years in between, with plenty of time for the next step to emerge I fear that fewer & fewer people have the tolerance for such an approach. in our hyper-competitive meritocracy, there is an intense focus on output. when we consider our work, our very identities are at stake. we must succeed or else; therefore, we must take the safest path, the best odds, the most certainty one of the key factors on Tolkien's journey was encouragement. CS Lewis was, for a long time, Tolkien's only audience for his work, and the one who pushed him to keep at it I worry about all the would-be Tolkiens working alone in the dark, in a culture screaming at them to get something done fast. I wonder how we can create space in our culture for that kind of slow, puttering work, the work of a patient gardener. I suspect the best way is to model it in ourselves, and to be the light of encouragement to everyone around us, in their own unique unfolding