In reference to Jim Wolverton’s question of, am I a Tolkien-style writer or a King-style writer I answer, I’m a mix of the two. I guess I should also throw in that I have a third author in my mix: Dave Wolverton (and this is not just a brown-nosing moment). I have made an extensive study, over the last near-twenty years (ever since Dave gave me a copy of On My Way to Paradise for my thirteenth birthday on Thanksgiving day twenty years ago) of writing how-to books. Some I have kept some I have discarded.
King or Tolkien?
I tried to do my writing once, pardon the pun, A-La-King, and did alright. Elsewhere he compares writing to seeing the story inside the words the way Michelangelo would see the sculpture trapped inside the stone, just chip at it until it comes out. I guess with words, it's kind of backwards: see the scene and write at it until it comes out. King states that he writes from situations: he sees the situation in his head and then starts asking the questions of why and how; why is this character in this situation; how did the character get there.
And there is something very good to be said there, when writing a scene look at the characters in the scene and ask yourself how and why is the character in the situation. But go into detail on characters, their depth and detail of that answer with care--we don't want to get so caught up in character creation and explanation that we don't write our story.
Tolkien, on the other hand, created almost every single character and situation from its linguistic root. Even the names and happenings to the Hobbits in the Lord of the Rings come from their name linguistic roots. For example, look at this quote from the Wikipedia page for Merry:
In the prefaces and appendices to The Lord of the Rings, Tolkien employed the conceit that he was the modern translator of a unique manuscript, the Red Book of Westmarch, and that his stories of Middle-Earth derived from that. In this guise of translator, he maintained that Meriadoc Brandybuck was not the character's real name, but rather Kalimac Brandagamba. This was said to be an actual phonetic transcription of the name in Westron, the Common Speech of western Middle-earth, which Tolkien said he transliterated to English as follows: The nickname "Merry" represents his actual nickname Kali which meant "handsome, happy", and "Meriadoc" serves as a plausible name from which a nickname meaning "happy" could be derived.
Merry is called Holdwine by Théoden and was thus known as such in the records of Rohan. It most probably derives from the Old English words hold and wine, respectively meaning "faithful" and "friend". Tolkien used Old English to represent Rohirric so Holdwine, like Meriadoc Brandybuck, is not what the character was actually called. Tolkien does not give Merry's real Rohirric name.
It has been asserted that the name Meriadoc could be in itself an allusion to the British nobleman Conan Meriadoc, legendary founder of the house of Rohan in Brittany, since the character Meriadoc is closely associated with Tolkien's kingdom of Rohan. (Wikipedia. Meriadoc Brandybuck. “Names and titles.” 2009)
Indeed, the fact that Merry ends up going with the Rohirim and serving their king, is because of this linguistic root. His name is very Anglo-Saxon (Old English) in origin and the Riders of Rohan are essentially a romanticized view of the Anglo-Saxons with horses, Merry went with his namesake group.
For my writing, though, I actually like Dave's approach of the three documents (Setting, Character, Conflict). It gives an opportunity for the chiseling-out of characters in their settings then the Conflicts document becomes the outline for the story. For my own trick, I have found that cloud writing (or even more visually the classic bubble brain-storming) helps get me started on those elements of setting, character, and conflict and then, when I get to a point that I understand my character and his situation well enough, I write up a seven-point character story, as suggested in Algis Budrys’ Writing to the Point.
I think this is kind of half-King, half-Tolkien.
Like I said, each writer has something good to offer. Each writer can almost be viewed as an extreme on the spectrum of story creation, but, ultimately, I think that there are benefits to taking some from each and making it your own.
