I feel like there’s sometimes a tendency among writing gurus to pretend that either you systematically plot everything beat by beat, or you only write the story as it spontaneously generates in your head, with no notes or thoughts about how it’s going. As it happens, I’m reading History of the Lord of the Rings right now. Tolkien is usually described as a discovery writer, and the people who say that are not wrong, but he didn’t necessarily sit around waiting for inspiration to strike either…

For starters, there was a comparatively short period at the start of a very long writing process where there a risk of it turning into the Hobbit Barchester Chronicles.(1) After faffing around with hobbit genealogies and drafts of the first chapter for a time, he decided (paraphrasing): “Gollum’s/Bilbo’s ring=evil/untrustworthy” and sometime after that: “Ring must be destroyed, probably in fiery volcanic feature.” In other words, from that point onwards, he knew what the central conflict would be and very approximately what the protagonists were trying to achieve.

A lot of things surprised him along the way: most notably Trotter, initially a far-traveling hobbit in wooden shoes with a secret identity, later a human of many names, (Aragorn, Ingold, Elfstone, etc) descended from Elendil, an escapee from a sunken island that might or might not have been named Numenor by this point. At first Tolkien thought Gandalf was trailing behind Bungo’s(2) group and trying to lure the Black Riders away, then he thought Gandalf was being held captive by an evil giant named Treebeard, and then realized that Gandalf was actually being held prisoner by the head wizard of his own order, turned collaborator with evil. All the while, the geography and its names were in a constant state of flux.

Even so, he would stop every couple chapters to summarize what he thought was going to happen later on in the plot, recalibrating, retargeting after every surprise. Basically, it’s okay if you’re the same way, and have to stop and make sense of the latest swerve the story has handed you.

(1) If anyone feels like writing the Halfling Barchester Chronicles, or even ordinary Shire fanfic, I encourage you to check out Return of the Shadow for many examples of Tolkien’s wacky Hobbit naming conventions, to supplement the ones in the ROTK appendices.

(2)you know him better as Frodo.