Botulf's Stone Blog

This is a revised post from my old blog.  The original of which can be found  here  for comparison. Warning: Contains spoilers for  The Chronicles of Prydain  and  The Lord of the Rings Endings are a linchpin in stories.  They are a little thing, often just the last tenth or less of the narrative, but how a story ends impacts everything that came before and the overall impression with which a readers leaves the story.  I did not especially enjoy reading  Where the Red Ferns Grow , but the last few pages hit me in such a way that I left the book satisfied.  On the other hand, as is evident in my posts on  All the Light We Cannot See , I was enjoying Doerr’s book a good bit, but the ending left me wondering how I should feel about everything that had come before.  They are the final  narrative consequence of everything that came before, and that’s what makes them hard to write and so important to discuss. I spent the  l...

Warning: Contains spoilers for  All the Light We Cannot See  by Anthony Doerr In his essay “The Fantastic Imagination,” George MacDonald describes one of the fundamentals of writing an imagined world: “[An author’s] world once invented, the highest law that comes next into play is, that there shall be harmony between the laws by which the new world has begun to exist; and in the process of his creation, the inventor must hold by those laws… Obeying law, the maker works like his creator; not obeying law, he is such a fool as heaps a pile of stones and calls it a church.” There is a wealth of insight I cut out from between these sentences, so I highly suggest following the link I shall provide below to read the full work, whether or not you care for writing fantasy.  After all, the principle MacDonald describes here applies to all fiction: no matter if the world is fantastic or mundane, there must be harmony with the world building, with the laws the author has established....