blog

Thom Dunn is a Boston-based writer, musician, and utterly terrible dancer. He is the singer/guitarist for the indie rock/power-pop the Roland High Life, as well as a staff writer for the New York Times’ Wirecutter and a regular contributor at BoingBoing.net. Thom enjoys Oxford commas, metaphysics, and romantic clichés (especially when they involve whiskey), and he firmly believes that Journey's "Don't Stop Believing" is the single greatest atrocity committed against mankind. He is a graduate of Clarion Writer's Workshop at UCSD ('13) & Emerson College ('08).

JRR Tolkien's Top 10 Tips For Writers

I feel like I'm supposed to make a snarky comment about Peter Jackson* in order to contextualize this, but the truth is, I haven't even seen The Desolation of Smaug or Battle of the Five Armies yet, because I found An Unexpected Journey to be little more than an overlong cut-scene from a corny Tolkien-themed Disney ride. But anyway, this is still fun!

*For the record, I was even skeptical when Jackson was first announced as the director of The Lord of the Rings trilogy, because he was one of my favorite go-to directors for my frequent Horrible & Horribly Offensive B-Movie nights back in high school. Don't get me wrong, Beautiful Dreamers and The Frighteners are both pretty fantastic — but Meet the Feebles? Dead-Alive? Bad TasteLet's just say that he's better telling someone else's story than his own.

Although, he did give us this: