I’ve had The Lord of the Rings<\/i> on the brain of late, the proximate cause being the repeated e-mails I’ve received from GameStop telling me to come into a local store to pre-order Lord of the Rings: Conquest<\/i>, which came out on Wednesday. And then, of course, there was my discovery that a new Tolkien book, a take on the Volsung saga he wrote in the 1920s, which contributed to my new inkling to think Middle-Earth.<\/p>\n
Musing on this, I thought I would share a tangential anecdote.<\/p>\n
My Doctor Who<\/i> short story, “The Spindle of Necessity,” for Short Trips: The Quality of Leadership<\/i>, involves the sixth Doctor and Plato of Athens going on a road trip in the ancient world. When I pitched the story, there was one scene in the story I was absolutely dying<\/i> to write — Plato and the Doctor talk about Atlantis.<\/p>\n
The reason should be obvious. Plato was the writer who introduced Atlantis to literature in his unfinished dialogue Critias<\/i>. And for the Doctor, he was there when Atlantis fell (“The Underwater Menace,” “The Time Monster”). So, naturally, the Doctor and Plato could have absolutely brilliant conversations about Atlantis, right?<\/p>\n
Wrong.<\/p>\n
I never figured out, in writing the story, where the scene would go or how it would fit. I know, in my head, how their conversation went, with Plato incredulous that the Doctor would claim to have been at Atlantis when it sank beneath the waves. And the Doctor was going to suggest a history of Atlantis that was a mish-mash of Plato’s history and Tolkien’s account of Numenor. (I think<\/i> the Doctor was going to namecheck Ar-Pharazon, but at this span I can’t remember.)<\/p>\n
I had pages of notes on this. I read Lewis Spense’s The History of Atlantis<\/i>.<\/p>\n
I ended up going in such<\/i> a different direction, that the story bypassed Atlantis completely<\/i>. I don’t regret that little scenelet’s lack. Especially when I found so many other<\/i> madcap things to write in that story. \ud83d\ude42<\/p>\n
Now, fair readers, you know. And you have a video game ad to thank. \ud83d\ude09<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
I’ve had The Lord of the Rings on the brain of late, the proximate cause being the repeated e-mails I’ve received from GameStop telling me to come into a local store to pre-order Lord of the Rings: Conquest, which came out on Wednesday. And then, of course, there was my discovery that a new TolkienContinue reading “On Unwritten Scenes”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[4082,292,594,4102],"class_list":["post-2163","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general","tag-doctor-who","tag-sixth-doctor","tag-spindle-of-necessity","tag-writing","entry"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2163","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=2163"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2163\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=2163"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=2163"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.allyngibson.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=2163"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}