Matt Colville, and Most Tolkien Critics, Are Wrong

[Imaculata]

Personally I wonder if it was true that modern people have such bad attention spans then how come modern novels like Game of Thrones, Wheel of Time and Harry Potter are so much longer then Lord of the Rings and apparently just as popular.

The Song of Ice and Fire books (which Game of Thrones is but one of), are written very differently from Lord of the Rings. Chapters are often short, and end in cliffhangers. I feel George RR Martin's style of writing is very similar in style to watching a movie or tv-show. So I can definitely see how it could cater to people with shorter attention spans.

 

[Ovinomancer]

The Song of Ice and Fire books (which Game of Thrones is but one of), are written very differently from Lord of the Rings. Chapters are often short, and end in cliffhangers. I feel George RR Martin's style of writing is very similar in style to watching a movie or tv-show. So I can definitely see how it could cater to people with shorter attention spans.

I liken GRRM to the anti-Tolkien. Tolkien had a terrific story and an amazing world but is a bad novelist. GRRM has no idea what his story is, but is a fantastic novelist.

Also, Tolkien was a class act. GRRM hates you.

 

[Ralif Redhammer]

"George R.R. Martin hates and loves you, as he hates and loves his books. He will never be rid of his need for them." - Gandalf

Also, Tolkien was a class act. GRRM hates you.

 

[Eltab]

IMO, Shakespeare is worth learning the language, because a lot of the depth of the work is lost in translation

In my parochial grade school, we students hated having to read and memorize verses from the King James Version of the Bible.
It was not the teachers' intent, but that turned out to be good practice for reading and understanding Shakespeare.

 

[Janx]

[MENTION=59082]Mercurius[/MENTION] One thing I will definitely agree with is that when a teacher is interested and engaging with a topic, students tend to pay attention. It's something I noticed myself as a student at uni.

I don't know if I fully agree with attention spans and devices but thinking about it more as I write this, maybe people do need to switch off more. Certainly as a teacher this is a phenomenon that you would be in better position to see. All I can say is that my nieces, and nephews, despite having devices still love to read and draw and play. They aren't teenagers though. I do wonder if it might have more to do with that period of life than easy access to devices and the internet.

This is the principal I've mentioned and Mercurious hit it on the head.

Us writers are advised to start with a hooking first sentence, to get to the chase. To grab your interest in the first 10-50 pages or you'll close the book and grab another on your kindle or flip open youtube or start sampling movies on netflix until one grabs you. That first chapter can't begin with "in a long long ago when the andals did some stuff and I'm gonna tell you about it in slo-mo before we get to the actual protagonist."

Now it's got to be "Bilbo felt the line jerk, halting his movement toward the museum floor, stopping inches away from the Valaarian Diamond."

TLDR happens because the opening text didn't grab and the reader wasn't invested in trying. It's the same reason we have click-bait titles.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

Dickens did not delight in extra words. He got paid by the word. Or, well, he may have delighted in getting paid, I suppose, but the point is that he had a strong economic reason to be wordy, where a modern author doesn't.

So did Dumas but I think he had more fun with it.

 

[Lord Mhoram]

There's lots of fun writing quirks around the author getting paid. If I recall correctly, Dumas (of Three Musketeers fame) got paid by the line, not the word, and that's why he has so many bits of back-and-forth dialog.

As I recall the story - he got paid for the word, until he got so good at words, they changed him to being paid by the sentence, which led to that.

 

[KahlessNestor]

I have been a high school teacher for about a decade and have seen a rather startling decline in, if not "attention spans," than the ability to become engaged in material that is not overtly stimulating. By this I mean books in general, stories that don't shock and wow you, or aren't immediately accessible and easy to read.

Not all students, but as an overall trend. It is rather disheartening.

And yes, I do think it has to do with access and usage of "smart"phones and various technologies that facilitate constant neuro-stimulation. So when you speak of "how engaging the book is," to me it speaks of a generation of young people who have access to endless forms of easy, passive, and creatively bereft forms of entertainment. Yes, we should find more engaging stories to read, but we also need to teach the capacity to become engaged, and this requires bringing back that old bugaboo: boredom.

I'm not exactly decrepit, but I remember having to fill the boredom of those endless summers of childhood with books, with TV only at night or on Saturday morning and no personal entertainment devices. It was this boredom that gave my imagination the opportunity be ignited. Kids have less and less opportunity to be bored, and thus find their own means of filling it with creative and imaginative activity. Every kid as their personal "entertainment device," which in my view is doing them a terrible, terrible disservice. We are keeping them from the fertile source of creativity: blessed boredom.

Speaking of which, I decided to read Lord of the Rings with a small class of 11th graders. We're a few chapters in and so far so good. The biggest hurdle is that most of them have seen the movies, some many times, so I'm trying to encourage to try to "dissolve" the pre-fabricated imagery (as good as it generally was), and enter into Tolkien's Secondary World afresh.

So far (a few chapters in) they are taking pretty well to the book, with lots of lively conversations. Maybe I'm biased, though, as I'm having a blast. Just today I gave a 20-minute lecture on the various orders of beings. It isn't every day that I get to talk about how the Istari and Balrogs are of the same general ontological status.

But with teenagers (and kids in general), the teacher's enthusiasm about a subject goes a long way in perking their interest. The fact that A) the students respect and like me, B) I'm clearly passionate about Tolkien, means C) they're more engaged with the book than if I was, say, teaching A Tale of Two Cities, which I have no love of (blech...no offense, @doctorbadwolf ).

Anyhow, @Ovinomancer, can you tell me exactly why you think it is a "bad novel?" What specifically? It is the first time I've read it all the way through in maybe two decades, so I can approach it afresh.

I gave you XP even though you dissed A Tale of Two Cities

 

[KahlessNestor]

[MENTION=59082]Mercurius[/MENTION] One thing I will definitely agree with is that when a teacher is interested and engaging with a topic, students tend to pay attention. It's something I noticed myself as a student at uni.

I don't know if I fully agree with attention spans and devices but thinking about it more as I write this, maybe people do need to switch off more. Certainly as a teacher this is a phenomenon that you would be in better position to see. All I can say is that my nieces, and nephews, despite having devices still love to read and draw and play. They aren't teenagers though. I do wonder if it might have more to do with that period of life than easy access to devices and the internet.

I am fairly certain there have been numerous studies on what screen time does to us. I know several online journals that have discussed it. And I know they recommend ZERO screen time for anyone younger than 2 years old, and carefully supervised and limited after that. So I'm fairly certain it's true. It certainly seems true to me. An anecdote that "It didn't happen to me" doesn't negate the fact that it is a trend.