Cutting Corners for a Royal Road

Hello, hello, and welcome to T.E.A. Time with Tayvin Bayless. To any first-time listeners, I hope you decide to stick around, because I’m glad you’re here. And a joyful welcome back to anyone joining me again. Have you ever wished for a faster way to learn a language? I know I have. This question brings me rather quickly to our phrase for the day: to cut corners.

Now, the literal image is straightforward. Imagine you’re walking around the edge of a rectangular field. The longest path is to follow the edges precisely. But if you cut across the corners, you can get to the other side faster. You save time, but you also skip part of the path.

In English, we use the phrase cut corners to describe doing something more quickly or cheaply than you should, in a way that results in a decline in quality. The focus isn’t really on speed. It’s on what gets lost when you choose speed over thoroughness. If a builder cuts corners on construction, the house might not be safe. If a chef cuts corners in the kitchen, the food might not be as good. If a teacher cuts corners in their lesson preparation, they might not be able to answer their students’ questions.

Here’s a quick example: I tried to save time by cutting corners on my preparation, and unfortunately it showed.

Keep that phrase in mind. We’ll come back to it.

If you’ve listened to the last few episodes, you know that I’ve been sick. I’m still on the road to recovery, though I’m progressing along it at a slower pace than I would like. I’ve needed to reschedule a few lessons to allow myself more time to rest. While I’m disappointed that I haven’t been able to speak with some of my students, I’m grateful for their understanding and willingness to accommodate my illness.

One of my favorite things to do with my free time is read. This week has provided me with ample time to make some progress in some of my favorite stories. There’s something about being sick that strips away every excuse for not picking up a book. The dishes can wait. The laundry can wait. The world can wait. There is only my cup of honey lemon tea, the pile of pillows, and whatever story I left off in yesterday.

I am very much a fan of traditionally published novels. When I talk about traditional publishing, or trad publishing, I’m referring to the standard method of publishing books. A publishing company receives manuscripts, meaning unpublished drafts of novels, from authors hoping to be published. If the company believes a book will appeal to readers, it signs a contract with the author and helps edit, market, and distribute the book.

Some of my favorite date nights with my wife have been going to the bookstore together. We arrive with no idea what we might be looking for, but after an hour or two of browsing the shelves, looking at summaries, and maybe even reading a chapter or two, we come away with a new world. A new adventure. We’ve had nights where we’ve left the store carrying so many books between us that I wondered how we would ever find time to read them all. We never have. The pile of unread books at home keeps growing. I’m sure I’ll read them all someday.

But trad publishing is not the only way to discover an exciting new story. With the internet, social media, and new tools that allow people to connect directly with their audience, there has been a recent surge in indie, meaning independent, publishing. Many authors in the fantasy genre are finding success publishing web novels, and one of my favorite websites to read English web novels is called Royal Road.

There are a lot of things to like about Royal Road. It’s a place where amateur and aspiring authors can begin to hone, meaning sharpen or improve, their skills. The website has authors post their books one chapter at a time. This encourages authors to publish on a consistent schedule, which helps them build both an audience and their writing skills.

Each chapter has an attached comments section. This provides a place for fans of the stories to engage with the author as well as each other. On some of the most popular stories, there might be hundreds of people adding comments, sharing their reactions to what has happened, and speculating about what might happen next. It creates a kind of community around each story, where the readers feel like they are part of the experience rather than just passive consumers of it.

So there I was, lying in bed catching up on the latest chapters of my new story obsession. Laughing at the jokes, getting frustrated at the obstacles the protagonist needed to overcome, and even crying at the tragic moments. And I was reminded of why I love these web novels.

They are not as polished as trad-published novels. They do not have professional editors. It is not uncommon to find grammatical mistakes in the writing. Their stories are not always original. They often use tropes common to the genre and recycle ideas that have been used by successful authors of the past. And yet, despite these faults, the stories are filled with passion.

The passion of a new author chasing their dream, with no idea where this path will lead them. The passion of someone with a full-time job and a family, who fills their limited free time with writing because of the pure love of the story. The passion of someone who doesn’t believe they will ever become a professional author, and yet continues to write because they can’t help it.

I think there are many unpolished gems on Royal Road. Some of them will eventually get picked up by a publisher and begin to sell their books to a wider audience. Many of them will not. Passion. Consistency. Love of the journey. These are a few of the many reasons that I find myself coming back to this website again and again.

I find it a little ironic that my favorite indie publishing website is called Royal Road, because one of the most famous lessons about learning uses that term, and begins with a king looking for a shortcut.

The year is somewhere around 300 BC. The place is Alexandria, Egypt. The king of Egypt at the time was a man named Ptolemy the First. Ptolemy was a patron of the arts and sciences, meaning he supported scholars and artists financially, encouraging them to pursue their work. One of those scholars was a Greek mathematician named Euclid, often called the father of geometry. Geometry, by the way, is the branch of mathematics that deals with shapes, lines, and space. If you’ve ever studied triangles, circles, and angles in school, you’ve studied geometry. And much of what we still teach today comes from the work that Euclid compiled in a book called The Elements.

So Ptolemy, being a curious king, decided he wanted to learn geometry. He invited Euclid to come and teach him personally. But after a while, Ptolemy grew frustrated. The process was slow. The proofs were long. The work was difficult. And so King Ptolemy, being used to having his way, asked Euclid a question. He asked whether there was a faster, easier way to learn geometry than going through all of these tedious proofs. Surely there was a shortcut for a king.

Euclid’s response has echoed through history. He said: there is no royal road to geometry.

Now, that phrase is doing more than it seems. The Royal Road was the name for an actual road. It was a famous highway built by the Persian king Darius the First, used to allow rapid travel and communication across his empire. So when Euclid said there is no royal road to geometry, he was telling the king of Egypt that even with all the wealth and power in the world, there is no special highway that takes you to understanding any faster than anyone else. The path that gets you there is the same path everyone else has to walk.

Which brings me back to today’s expression: cut corners.

You cannot cut corners in language learning. There is no shortcut. There is no royal road. There is no app or trick or hack to reach fluency in thirty days. I know that isn’t what most people want to hear, including me. I’ve wished for the shortcut more times than I can count. But the truth is the same for English as it was for Ptolemy and geometry. You walk the path. You do the work. You show up consistently. And over time, the path takes you somewhere worth going.

And here is where the irony of the website’s name becomes really interesting. Because of Euclid’s response to Ptolemy, the phrase royal road has become synonymous, meaning equivalent in meaning, with the idea of a shortcut. To find a royal road to something is to find an easier or faster way to reach it. So a website named Royal Road, by that logic, should be the place where authors find quick success.

But that isn’t what happens there at all. The authors I read on Royal Road don’t find shortcuts. They find readers, slowly, one chapter at a time. They find improvement, gradually, one piece of feedback at a time. They find success, if they find it, after years of posting consistently, often during early mornings or late nights, around their full-time jobs and their families. The website may be named Royal Road, but the path the authors actually walk is the same path Euclid was talking about. The long one. The real one. The one with no shortcuts.

That, I think, is the lesson worth carrying forward. There is no royal road, even on a website named Royal Road. 

So here’s something to think about: where in your study routine have you been hoping for a shortcut? And what would it look like to stop looking for one, and just walk the path instead?

There is no royal road to English. But there is a road, old, reliable, and well trodden. Anyone can walk it. If you do, you will be amazed at where it can take you.

And with that, my cup is empty. Thanks for joining me for T.E.A. Time. Until the next pot.