I think I’ve mentioned here briefly before that I finally have a name for my cohesive, overarching storyverse, to which perhaps 75% of my stories, both published and planned, belong. It’s The Veiled Worlds, a reference to the fact that the fey live in The Realms, a world veiled from ours, and ours veiled from theirs, and yet both mutually accessible in the right sort of ways.
It’s a permutation, in many ways, of slightly step-sideways Christian mythology, because in seeking to avoid appropriation that seemed to be most appropriate: to take the mythology that is my own, and to use that as a springboard into some fictional world. I wanted very much to create a universe that really was only step-sideways from our own; something almost believable, almost a real reflection of reality. And I stand by that, and still do, and am committed to a variety of tales in that universe that – with luck – I will actually get written before I die *self-depricating eyeroll*
However.
I’ve just yesterday finished rereading The Lord Of The Rings, which I’ve not read since I first read it twenty years ago (!), though I am intimately familiar with the films (extended versions, if you please, and I’ve even watched the cast commentary several times). I’ve read The Hobbit and The Silmarillion too, though The Silmarillion similarly was read last twenty years ago. I might post another time about my experience rereading the series, and how I’ve fallen neck deep into the world, and am absorbing everything of it I can like a thirsty little sponge desperate for more…
…but what prompted me to come here, at what is actually rather a late hour (though it won’t be when this posts), is a sentence in the opening of Tolkien’s letter to Milton Waldman (1951) which is reprinted (in part?) in my edition of The Silmarillion. In it, he notes that the Elves create with the object of pure “sub-creation not domination and tyrannous reforming of Creation”, and this struck me.
I’ve read the introduction to On Fairy-Stories too, with the intention soon of reading his actual essay, but I have enough of the gist to understand that in his world view, sub-creation is the Thing, the Purpose, and All. And I got to wondering: which is it that I’m doing with The Veiled Worlds? In leaning into my extant mythology and reshaping that to fit the trappings of paranormal fantasy that I wanted to write about (shapeshifters and humans with magic and so forth), am I not, in actuality, simply “reforming … Creation”, rather than practising genuine sub-creation? Am I taking reality and reshaping it to my will? How would I know if I was doing this instead of sub-creating? What is does the difference between the two look like?
I want to say – I suspect – that sub-creation looks more like reflecting the world as it is than reshaping it to one’s desires.
But also – surely – there is value in an idealistic creation, something that is neither descriptive nor prescriptive but rather… Urgh. There’s a word that I want here and it isn’t coming, and idealistic isn’t quite what I mean, but it’s all I’ve got. (This is what I have and I shall simply have to trust that you understand what I mean.)
Is it valid, then, to use creative powers for this reshaping, or is there something perhaps nobler or higher or… *flails for words*.
I don’t think there’s anything particularly wrong with my original starting point, of wanting to make something out of a mythology that belongs – as much as mythology can be said to belong – to me. But now, perhaps, I am also thinking about what it means to sub-create instead of dominate, of what my fiction might be like were I to pursue that philosophical basis for it, what kinds of stories that would lead to. Because it feels like something deeper, something more meaningful, something – okay, I’ll say it – better and more satisfying that merely reshaping of the world to suit my fantasies; and it’s not that I don’t want to write these Veiled Worlds stories I’m committed to, but it is perhaps a rethinking of their genesis, or perhaps the genesis of a new secondary world, a second overarching universe in which to play, that follows a different fiction-writing methodology.
I’ve no answers to this new-to-me idea, this newborn thought train; but it is something that intrigues me this evening, and I think it might be an interesting and possibly instructive exercise to contrast two universes birthed and written via these two different methodologies, one of pure sub-creation and one of a reshaping or domination of the current world.
I suspect as I finish both Tolkien’s letter and his essay “On Fairy-Stories” I’ll develop more cogent thoughts, but for now, this is an interesting (to me) place to begin. And I’m excited to see what stories this new way of thinking might produce.