On Tolkien And Drawing Fruit

After several years of constantly moving house, I finally settled long-term in the autumn of 2024, which means my parents are keen for me to sort through and reclaim or dispose of a lot of the stuff they’ve been looking after for the last ten years. Every time I come to stay, I’m invited to “do a bit of sorting”, an activity I approach with dread or avoid if at all possible — decision making isn’t my forte, and I am a deeply sentimental person who has to think seriously hard about whether they need a pile of notes from GCSE History despite the fact that I have been out of school for over a decade and the curriculum has changed significantly enough that nobody would really benefit from revision for an exam that no longer exists.

The need for this process has been accelerated by the fact that there will be a new baby in my family in the coming year, and so my parents are taking in several boxes of items to be kept but not urgently needed to make room for the baby at my sister’s house. As such, a ruthless cull of cupboards and underbed storage has been in progress, and over Christmas and New Year, I was drafted in to do my part.

In the process, I came across the final sketchbook from my GCSE Art exam, and it made me think about some specific writing discourse that’s been going around Bluesky recently. (Stick with me, it’ll make sense eventually.)

A tracing of a drawing of the composer Stravinsky.
Me, taking items out of a box: “I’ve found… this?”
My parents, immediately: “Ah, Stravinsky!”
Because of course there is a tracing of Stravinsky in this box. Why wouldn’t there be.

For those unfamiliar with the English school system or who were fortunate enough never to have anybody in their family take GCSE Art, it’s worth providing some context. GCSEs are national exams taken in year 11, usually age 16 (unless you’re very young for your year, and then might be 15). The number of subjects taken varies by school, but is usually around 9-12. The majority of these will be compulsory subjects, sometimes with wiggle room about the details — for example, it might be compulsory to do at least one modern foreign language, but you may be able to choose which one. Once all the compulsory subjects are out of the way, though, you get a couple of choices, usually the more creative subjects like Music, Art, Drama, Design & Technology, etc.

I did not, technically, choose Art. This is partly because I’d seen my older sister go through it, and I knew that it was fairly soul-destroying, requiring more time and effort than half the other subjects put together — and expensive, too, once you start buying materials. Far from an easy option, it was a gruelling commitment that would take over your life and also, if they were kind enough to help you by driving you to galleries, scrapyards, or National Trust properties to take photos and collect ideas/materials, your families’ lives. But I did put Art as my second choice, and when my first choice subject didn’t run due to lack of uptake, I ended up with it. Uh-oh.

I am fundamentally not a visual artist. As well as the chronic pain in my hands that would prevent me from ever spending enough time drawing to get good at it, my brain doesn’t seem to be wired in that way: I’m not great at translating 3D objects into 2D images and vice versa, and I have a very non-visual imagination, so it’s hard to create pictures in my head, even before I think about putting those down on paper. I struggle to recognise people IRL when I’ve only seen them in 2D on Zoom (and also in general; I am terrible at faces); my depth perception is poor and I have been known to open doors into my face; and when, at the end of year 10, we had a Still Life drawing exam, I failed it. I got an E: 37.5%.

I’m providing this as vital context because often when I say to people that I’m no good at drawing, they think I’m being humble, or exaggerating somehow. But no. I am genuinely not good at drawing.

Despite my year 10 grade, I got an A in GCSE Art overall, the result of working incredibly hard in year 11 and during the run-up to the final exam — and figuring out how to do that without ever having to draw an object or something from my own head. I’ve often referred to this self-deprecatingly as “gaming the system”, or dismissively pointed out that the exam mark scheme isn’t measuring artistic ability, just your ability to tick specific boxes, which I worked out how to tick. This isn’t untrue, but I think it’s an uncharitable reading of what I actually did, which is to figure out how to play to my strengths and use the skills I actually had.

A few examples of this:

  • We were given a list of themes to choose from for our final project. As a musician and dancer, I chose the prompt “Music & Dance”, so that I would be able to draw on my own interests and experience to shape the piece.
  • I chose a theme for my piece that would involve research, because then I could write up my findings, and writing is something I can do. My piece was themed around the Rite of Spring, so I had pages in the sketchbook about Stravinsky, Diaghilev and the Ballet Russes, the original sets and costumes, modern sets and costumes, the history of the production, etc. (Now we understand the Stravinsky.)
  • I was better at the crafts side of arts & crafts: mixed media was going to be my friend. Not only did this mean less time struggling with a pencil, but it also gave me easy fodder for the “design development” side of the coursework: I could create the same piece in different media (paint, pastels, cardboard, clay, etc), document the process, write up what worked and didn’t work, and tick a ton of boxes that way.
  • Though I have never been any good at drawing from life or my imagination, I do have fairly good fine motor skills — I did a lot of crafts and calligraphy as a child. So I am good at copying pictures, especially with the help of things like the grid technique. We were often expected to do “artist copies” and, since I was pretty good at these, I created a piece that revolved around them: the backgrounds of my final piece were inspired by Roerich’s original set designs for the Rite of Spring, while the human figures in the piece drew on the costumes from the 2012 English National Ballet production (I was creating this piece in spring 2012, and went to see it). I copied pictures of costumes from theatre programmes and the internet, and used these alongside the write-ups to illustrate the development of my ideas.
  • I chose artists whose style suited mine. I was never going to be able to replicate a photorealistic style and trying would only have caused me grief, but I had a hope of a halfway convincing copy of Degas — and when you’re theming your piece around a ballet, he’s an obvious choice. I still have one of my Degas copies on the wall of my house. It’s not bad.

And so on, and so forth. Having failed my drawing exam, I identified what skills I didn’t have — still life drawing — and then, rather than continuing to struggle with that, figured out what skills I did have — research, writing, copying flat images, etc. While my final piece was still no masterpiece, I was genuinely impressed as I flicked through that sketchbook, not only because of the sheer amount of work that had gone into it but also how impressive the results had been.

A page from my GCSE Art sketchbook titled "Costume Design". On the left are drawings in coloured pencil of Nicholas Roerich's original designs for the Rite of Spring, with written discussion of the costumes. On the right are two pencil drawings of costumes used by the English National Ballet in 2012, one for the Rite of Spring and one for the Firebird.

After re-doing a bunch of my year 10 coursework with the skills I’d learned from this, I got a B for that, and an A* for the final project (sketchbook + exam piece), pulling me up to an A overall. Maybe I gamed the system and figured out how to tick boxes, yes — but maybe I learned an important lesson about using the skills I actually had to compensate for the ones I didn’t, and creating something that was not only better than anything I would create using those weaker skills, but also more “me”, because it drew on my interests and my abilities. And in doing so, I developed new skills and used those to improve my other work.

I’m not telling you all this to boast about 16-year-old me’s grades, though. So what does any of this have to do with writing discourse?

Well, while I try to stay out of these kinds of circular discussions and meaningless arguments these days for the sake of my sanity, I constantly see the same conversations circling again and again: does all fantasy fiction need a ton of “worldbuilding”? What is worldbuilding anyway: are we talking about the stuff that makes it onto the page of the book, or are we talking about producing huge amounts of off-page material, fully realising every detail of a world that characters will only see small parts of? Do you have to make up your own language to write secondary world fantasy? Do you have to create endless family trees and histories for all your characters?

Do you, in fact, need to be Tolkien?

These arguments are frequently circular, and the same things come round again. “Worldbuilding is for people who actually wanted to write a manual for a tabletop roleplaying game, not a novel,” one person will argue. “Every story has worldbuilding, even contemporary litfic,” another person will point out, “it’s about understanding how the characters and plot interact with the setting.” Someone else will say, “Maybe you guys are using two different definitions of worldbuilding. Are we talking about what’s in the book itself, or is this about the way some aspiring fantasy authors spent ten years creating a world without ever writing the book?”

Such attempts to clarify discourse are rarely as popular as black and white takes. Accusations will be made, sides will be taken, and people will keep coming back to the same arguments that seem to me to usually come down to talking across each other because nobody set out the definitions of the terms they were arguing with. (Admittedly, my attempts to stay out of this mean I usually see it all secondhand, so I’m sure there’s more going on that I don’t see.)

And when it comes to conlanging… well, there are good points well made on both sides. No, you shouldn’t just take a real, modern, marginalised language spoken by real human beings and declare it a magical fantasy language (as so often happens to Celtic languages in particular); conlanging avoids this kind of appropriation. But no, you also don’t have to create an entire language from scratch with a comprehensive grammar and extensive vocabulary before you’re allowed to think about writing secondary world fantasy; not every story needs this, and not every writer is suited to this.

It’s here that Tolkien’s shadow looms large, being one of the most notable creators of fantastical languages above and beyond what was needed for the story that actually made it onto the page. Yes, of course this adds a depth to his settings that few authors can match in this particular area — but does it matter that they can’t?

As I have seen pointed out, both on Bluesky and on Tumblr, Tolkien didn’t create languages because that was what fantasy authors were “supposed to do”: he did it because he was a philologist, and that was what interested him. He wasn’t forcing himself to muddle through an activity he didn’t enjoy and found difficult in order to meet an arbitrary standard of detail, he was using the skills and interests he already had to create something that interested him.

And, you see… not everybody is a medievalist. (I know, big if true.) Not everybody has academic expertise in linguistics. Not everybody needs to. They have their own skills, their own backgrounds, their own hobbies. But if everybody spends all their time feeling like they need the same skills and knowledge as everybody else in order to create art, what you end up with is worse art that is less original and has less to say. Interesting, detailed art comes from using your skills, knowledge, passion, and/or background to tell a story that only you could tell — not from forcing yourself to jump through a hoop that somebody else had a day job in walking through.

In other words, if you’re the kind of person to get 37.5% in a still life drawing exam, don’t create a final piece that consists of a pencil drawing of three apples and a glass jug. Figure out what skills you do have that will let you create interesting art that says something you, yourself, want to say.

My GCSE art sketchbook open to a page titled "Experimentation: medium" showing a step-by-step write-up of how I developed a piece with layers of painted cardboard, based on the original set design by Roerich, which features mountains around a lake. I'm holding the cardboard piece in question, which covers half the sketchbook.

That doesn’t mean never challenging yourself to draw a fruit ever again. If you want to develop a skill, because you love it but you’re just not there yet, then by all means start practising! But — and forgive me if I’m wrong here, because I am, as we have noted, not a visual artist — you don’t learn how to do still life by copying other people’s still life. Otherwise, I would be great at it by now. It’s not just about the mechanical act of pencil on a page: it’s about learning to look at an object, to perceive it, to understand how light and shapes and depth are working. It doesn’t come by only focusing on other people’s finished products: it means breaking it down into the skills involved, and learning how those work, and practising them, and figuring out what they look like for you.

For me, writing The Butterfly Assassin involved drawing several apples, most of them science-related — I haven’t done any science since I was sixteen. I do, however, have research skills, which I applied, and more than that, I have scientifically-minded friends, who helped me. I still didn’t attempt to mirror the scientific detail of a novel like This Mortal Coil, because unlike Emily Suvada, I didn’t study maths and astrophysics at university and I don’t have the kind of brain that lends itself to data science, hacking, and understanding genetic engineering. But despite shifting the focus away from scientific detail for the most part, I still found these elements disproportionately hard to write. I learned from doing it, but I also resolved that I wouldn’t do that again. Everyone in book two, I concluded, was getting stabbed, not poisoned, and if I needed a creative assassination method, I would find one another way — there are enough historical assassinations that I could borrow from that would only require historical research skills, rather than having to understand the science behind it to plan one from the ground up.

I cannot write like a scientist: I can only write like me.

Writing The Wolf and His King, by contrast, draws on my existing skills and knowledge as a medievalist. That doesn’t mean it has been easy, or that it hasn’t involved research. It’s been a challenge in its own way, demanding knowledge of historical details that I, as a literature expert, didn’t have; it’s tested my mastery of the English language and forced me to think hard about imagery and metaphors; it’s seen me in the University Library’s reading rooms consulting maps and non-borrowable books; it’s benefited from another year attending lectures about medieval French literature; it’s been constantly reworked and developed based on my reading and research. But those are skills I have, even if it’s not knowledge I already possessed. I have been able to pursue those questions in more detail than somebody without that background, and I’ve created something that feels like me in a way that gives it depth and layers.

I am no longer trying to figure out how to disguise my wonky apples so that people don’t realise my depth perception was off the whole time: I’m creating a mixed media piece of historical research chasing my own interests and passions to create a piece of art I care about. This is not to say that I think The Butterfly Assassin is bad — it’s no failed still life exam, I’m still plenty proud of it. But it stretched me perhaps in directions that I’m not naturally inclined to go, and I was constantly having to remind myself to write like me, to focus on what I was trying to do with the story, rather than trying to squash myself into an imagined box of Required Talents To Write Dystopian Thrillers.

That’s also not to say I will only ever write medieval fantasies in the future. There are all sorts of stories I want to tell, in different genres and with different emphases. But the older I get, the more I’m learning how to use my existing skills to do that, rather than trying to follow somebody else’s methods and wondering why I can’t perfectly replicate the results. And if one day I sit down and try to do the writing equivalent of still life drawing again — well, it will be because I decided I wanted to, and it would be the best way to tell the story I wanted to tell, not because I thought I had to do it if I wanted to be a good writer.

So, in the end, what I have to say about worldbuilding discourse is this:

  • All stories require you to understand their world. They don’t all require you to know the same things about it.
  • A book with an incredibly detailed world is not automatically better than a book with a lightly sketched outline of a world. A book that only needs a lightly sketched outline and has a ton of detail might feel bogged down in unnecessary info; a book that needs detail and doesn’t have it will feel inconsistent. It’s about what the story needs. See point 1.
  • Not every story that asks the same questions will need the same answers or find them in the same way. You don’t have to follow somebody else’s rules for developing a magic system or whatever if those rules aren’t serving the story you’re telling. It’s your story — see point 1.
  • If your goal is to write a book, eventually you need to stop developing background details and write the book. If you keep getting stuck on this, try writing the book first and then answer the questions it raises, rather than trying to predict the answers you need and creating the setting up-front. This will help make sure you spend time on things that are actually relevant, and even if it doesn’t work for you in the long run, it might help you break out of your current loop. But if you’re developing imaginary worlds for fun with no plans to write a book then there are no limits, you don’t have to stop, and I hope you have a good time.

And finally, the most important point, and the one that justifies this tortured artistic metaphor:

  • You don’t have to be Tolkien, especially if your skills and interests lie in different areas. Be the best you, not the worst copy. If you’re a natural sculptor, put down the pencil and go get yourself some marble.

The skills and knowledge and background and day job that you have are assets too, even if they don’t look obviously applicable to what you’re trying to write. Learn how to use them, and I’m pretty sure you’ll have more fun and make better art in the process. Which is, in the end, what it’s all about.


You can judge how well I applied my artistic skills by buying or pre-ordering my books! I promise they contain fewer tortured metaphors than this post.

6 comments

  1. Dave Higgins says:

    Something that can be useful for not feeling forced to go too far outside one’s competencies is that almost all people in almost all circumstances will only go two connections in when seeking more detail on something they’ve read/seen and then assume further consistent layers exist without checking.

    One semi-famous example is: The author wants the protagonist to encounter a giant albino alligator in the sewers, which is a somewhat unfeasible thing that would need a lot of research to justify using zoology &c.; instead, come up with an explanation that fits the world (e.g. there are giant albino alligators in the sewers to stop vampires using them to travel) then add a second level (the alligators are bred by a militant splinter of the Order of St Brigit who are committed to keeping evil from waterways); as long as there’s that much explanation almost all readers will assume that you have a valid zoology &c. without needing to know what it is.

    • Finn Longman says:

      Yes! An in-universe explanation can do a lot of the work for you, and add layers while it’s doing it – it’s a win-win.

      I sort of did the opposite in TWAHK, by accident, which is to say I did a ton of research when the in-universe explanation already existed. I was trying to figure out a plausible backstory that explained characters’ circumstances at the start of the book and I spent AGES doing historical research to figure it out… only to realise, once I’d done this, that I’d basically just reinvented the plot of several medieval romances. Could’ve just taken the romance explanation and saved myself the trouble 😅

  2. Chalkletters says:

    By complete coincidence this post + something else I read today combined into a solution to the plot problem I’ve been having for MONTHS. So thank you for that!

  3. L says:

    This was a great article and a very good point about not forcing oneself to be the same as everyone else. Sadly my writing doesn’t really have an identity, and my art is often molded to fit source materials. There’s only one topic in which I have my own take on stuff.

    Also awesome artwork!! Cool themes too. Wish you a good 2025

    Wish you a happy new year.

    • Finn Longman says:

      I think you’re probably being a little harsh on yourself! You might think you only have your own take on one thing, but I can guarantee you that if I got a dozen people looking at the same thing and asked them what they took from it, not one of them would give exactly the same answer, because it would always be shaped by who they are. You might not be able to see your writing’s identity yet, but that doesn’t mean it isn’t there; sometimes it takes a bit of digging to find those unconscious layers and start doing them on purpose, but they’re in there somewhere. The more you lean into the things that excite you and the details you care about, the louder they’ll resound through the work.

What do you think? I'd love to hear your thoughts.

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