The Beginning

Of how he began writing 'Lord of the Rings', Tolkien is quoted saying, 'I wisely started with a map.' I also started with a map, though in my case it was the map of Switzerland.

I commenced 'seriously' writing my first novel when I was in high school at the age of 16. It was going to be about dwarves, of course. Oh, and they had to be paladins, too; I had just quit WoW at the release of Cataclysm (for reasons I will not delve into for the sake of brevity), and my desire to continue being a plate-wearing, hammer-wielding dwarf had to find some sort of expression.

(My friends were already aware of my obsession with dwarves, for good or ill.…)

The first thing I did was open up Google Earth and zoom in on the Swiss Alps, for I wanted my setting to be rooted in the mountains I loved so dearly. Fate would have it that I found myself gazing down at the valley of Grindelwald, over which tower Eiger, Mönch, and Jungfrau. Being an etymology enthusiast, I asked my dad what the names meant, to which he responded: the ogre, the monk, and the maiden.

 “The monk stands between the ogre and the maiden to protect her,” he told me. I immediately knew where I wanted to start my story.

 A decade later, my dad took me to see the three great faces of the Bernese Alps for the first time. I had imagined them 100 times in my head, but nothing compared to the reality; they were indescribably vast, forbidding even. It was nothing less than surreal to stand before them at last, humbled by their mightiness and honored that they had called on me all those years ago.