[Legate of Amon Lanc]

Originally Posted by Inziladun

That said, I think any author of fiction who is at least tolerably good at it, must fall into the world of their story and believe in it themselves; otherwise, how could we readers take it seriously?

Well, you will wonder, but I think some don't. Or, in any case, not in the "Tolkienish" sense - of being in there - sometimes the writing can be detached, "programmed", especially if the author wants to put in some message, which is more important for him than the requisites of the story.

Personally, I don't feel any more 'drawn' into Tolkien's books than I do for the works of other authors. For me, when reading a book I like, the suspension of disbelief and sense of being there are equal, whether I'm reading The Silmarillion, Stephen King's 'Salem's Lot, or Arthur Conan Doyle's A Study In Scarlet. Tolkien's books are especially dear to me though because I do love the world, the characters, and in particular the incomparably exquisite and powerful liguistic style.

Hmm, as for me, it certainly is not the same with every book. Some are just badly written and you do not get into it as much anyway. And with some it really works, I recall this one book where a character was in the desert, for whole one chapter, thirsty, trying to find a way out, and I really was just sitting there, reading the book and sharing it, I could not get up from it, even though I felt unbelievably thirsty as well. Something similar happened to me, in fact, with Frodo and Sam in Mordor. But some books just pull you into the world strongly, some don't as much.

Originally Posted by Ibrîniðilpathânezel

When you determine that a certain character is to do something, you wonder about their motivation, and in determining their motivation, you begin to build their past history, which grows into a family tree, with other people who came from other places and did things in their own rights. As cities are imagined, the societies that inhabit them is created, and given histories of their own. The process of imagining one thing pulls you into imagining another, and another, and another.

Tolkien, I think, rather neatly summed up much of the process early in LotR:

That, in my experience, is very much like the process of inventing your own world, in which your characters live and have adventures. It draws you in, and quite often, it sweeps you along in the current of your own imagination unleashed. It's often a difficult process, but it can be exhilarating as well.

Yes, well, I have similar experience, but rather from my creating the RPG scenarios and worlds, where it is more like "mechanical", though: I simply have to know where this character came from, to determine what is he going to act like when he meets the player characters, and to know what was his life like up to now, I have to make up more of his home country, and when I am doing it, I have to know who is the ruler of it etc. But it is not always that I would be necessarily interested in it the way I understand it with Tolkien. This was really a necessity: more like a mechanical process, indeed.

But from my personal experience also, another thing is when I am "just writing", and I don't have any particular intention to "explore the world" - I just have the inspiration and, rather, I watch the story unfold in front of me, as it goes, not knowing what comes next, but I am an observer, dragged into the story, but I do not have any intentions of my own. I do not want to know what happens next. I don't think about it. It just happens. That is something Tolkien wrote about as well, I think. But of course not that it would happen all the time.

The third situation would be what Tolkien says - this exploring, and at least for me this is extremely rare. Simply a sort of conscious working on the process (like in the first case I mentioned), but at the same time, being dragged into the story actively, being "inside it", as Sam Gamgee would say (like in the second case). This is when I am actually there on the plains of Rohan or wherever and decide, yes, there are these mountains one can see on the horizon - I wonder what is there? And you go there (intentional activity) and find something there (unintentional activity, like in the second case). This is what I understand under Tolkien's journeys to Faërie. But like I say, at least for me, it is extremely rare to get into that mood - to enter the true realm of Faërie in the first place, so to say.