Friday Five #27: Stories

[ornoth]

What were your favorite childhood stories?

I don’t have any specific affinities for any writing prior to 7th grade (12 years of age). However, my English teacher at that time read some juvenile lit aloud each day in class. We went through Madeleine L’Engle’s “A Wrinkle in Time” and J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Hobbit”. The latter made enough of an impression that I went on to read and enjoy the slightly more adult “Lord of the Rings” trilogy and become a hardcore Tolkien fan.
 
I also aped “The Hobbit” the following year in the first piece of fiction I ever wrote, a 4-page, 2200-word quest to bring healing medicine to an afflicted prince. Instead of Gandalf the Grey, I had Galor the Elder. In place of Mirkwood my story introduced the Wood of Darkness, a place haunted by the spirits of the dead trees, which took the form of skeletal flying monkeys (a là “Wizard of Oz”). Instead of the Misty Mountains, I had the Murky Mountains, and instead of Gollum I provided the Farog, a solitary subterranean beastie with a poisonous bite. Tolkien’s Beorn was replaced by a healer named Thodin living alone between the wood and the mountains. The story was titled, appropriately enough, “Ornoth’s Journey”, after the protagonist, a prince who undertook the quest along with his brother and sister and the wizard. The opening line, reworked a thousand times in dozens of subsequent revisions, is forever branded in my mind:

Spring came early to Gamdorn, and all of the fields were alive with color, as a stranger clad in a dark robe stroke up the walk to the doors of the large Royal Hall…

But that’s getting rather afield from the original line of inquiry.
 

What books from your childhood would you like to share with [your] children?

My what???
 

Have you re-read any of those childhood stories and been surprised by anything?

Re-reading Tolkien was something of a letdown, because by then I’d become a very proficient fantasy writer and editor myself, and I found his work quite different in style from that which I preferred. While he still retained the sense of wonder that is absolutely critical to the success of any fantasy story, I disagreed with his pacing, and had outgrown the remoteness and the moral absolutes of high fantasy, having found low fantasy both more palatable and more fertile for stories of real human interest.
 

How old were you when you first learned to read?

I have no recollection. A typical age. Three to five?
 

Do you remember the first 'grown-up' book you read? How old were you?

No real recollection, although the “Lord of the Rings” might qualify.

You’d think that as a writer I would have stronger opinions about fiction, but in truth I consider prose a rather cheap commodity. After all, much of it is poorly-written, and even the stuff that’s well-written is easily come by and available in a near inexhaustible quantity. Therefore I don’t tend to value fiction very highly. That might seem an odd view for someone who claims creative writing as their primary method of artistic expression, but so it is.