For me, things like the elven languages didn't read so much as conceit as eccentricity and individual passion. I guess conceit is actually a good description in the sense that it felt like Tolkien was doing it because he loved it, without regard for the reception as much (not that he had to worry it turns out, -he had an audience). He was on his own jam, that's for sure. I appreciate that, but tbh, the end result is I skipped some of that shit. I don't care if it's an Elvish ballad, Ishmael's cetological aspirations, or Rand's Galt taking 60 pages to do what the rest of the novel was already doing, but a thousand times more boring...I reserve the right to hit the space-bar.its language is just as byzantine, the concepts just as foreign, and the conceit of "elven languages" is front and center.
"I try to leave out the parts that people skip." - Elmore Leonard I read this two weeks ago and ended up nuking a 5800 word chapter down to 1800 words. In the script it had been important to have this big bolus of exposition because I only had 110 pp double spaced to work with. Following the script, that chapter was where the big bolus existed. But in the novel I'd been able to work it in without any effort or exposition whatsoever - it was all first person discovery. Fuckin' liberating - The book went from 192k to 187k in an afternoon.