why isn’t there a short film based on the thing where diana wynne jones refused to drop out of tolkien’s college class even though he was intentionally making it as boring and dense and unintelligible as possible so that everyone would drop out and he could get out of teaching it and write lotr instead. just imagine the potential of a 1940s Female College Student sitting in an empty classroom with Secretly Furious professor resentfully lecturing a meandering incomprehensible stream-of-consciousness inner monologue about The Structure of Narrative to this kid determined to get her money’s worth out of this chump. and them both getting way more personal and intellectual development out of this song-and-dance than they thought they would. hey guys why isn’t there a
I love this idea. In our world Diana (1950s, Tolkien was working on The Return Of the King) went every week. In the end it was just her and one other man. Tolkien wanted them both to quit because if nobody turned up for one lecture he got the rest of the term off to write. So his lectures were not actually student friendly, delivered as they were inaudibly to the blackboard. (She said it wasn’t the denseness so much as the pipe in his teeth, that you couldn’t see his mouth or hear exactly what he was saying, and he seemed to be talking to himself. The bits she could make out were fascinating but they were few and far between.)
Meanwhile, Diana told me, CS Lewis was a rock star, delivering his lectures in the biggest hall at Oxford, with students hanging from the rafters.
In the story world, Diana would be the only student. And she’d do a deal with Tolkien, to learn Story Things out of class, in exchange for not coming any more.
Except... I like that Diana became the best writer of magic, possibly the best children’s author ever, all on her own. She didn’t need Tolkien magic or CS Lewis magic. She just needed to be irritated by the books she was reading her children, and determined to write better. And it took her a couple of books until she got there. But she did.