Am I a good compromise because I'm nineteen and human, here?

Yes, exactly. You're closer to his peer, in some ways, but also vanishingly unlikely to throw him in a fountain or react to immaturity with immaturity.

Happy to help. I have negligible experience with kids but I'm mostly just interacting with him like he's - well, from a different culture, may need lots of things explained but not because he's not brilliant, which he is. I have practice at that.

I"m not sure treating him like a child would help. And your method clearly works, so -

On and off. So far.

He smiles. He likes you. He's trying to invent something so he can write faster.

It'll take me a while to get as far as 'crystal ball and scriber' in my wizardry reinvention, so that's probably a good idea.

He was imagining a device that stamped all the letters onto a page of parchment, so you could select a letter and have it appear on the page.

Sounds complicated.

Absurdly so. I can't think why it couldn't work in principle, though.

I guess, if he refines it enough. It seems like it might take practice to use, too, for making it stamp a particular letter to be less time consuming than just writing it.

A lot of people would call it lazy, too.

Why?

Well, because it involves looking at something that has a lot of work associated and deciding to find a way out of doing the work. Personally I think - there is a very important difference between Fëanáro noticing that a book will be a lot of work and trying to invent something easier and Fëanáro noticing that a book will be a lot of work and ordering someone to write while he dictates.

I don't see why it shouldn't be less work to write a book. The interestingly hard part of writing a book isn't forming the letters! Being able to write fast will let him do more of the part that's actually worth it for itself. He'll have more time to spend on plotting and editing and moving on to the next book.

He nods, You've read more books than I. Was his all right, for a child's?

I was really impressed. I mean, for one thing, children generally don't have spelling and grammar that good. Adults sometimes don't. And he's been speaking Pax for a single-digit number of days. It was... stylistically not the sort of thing that I'd expect to see in a bookstore, even if bookstores tended to contain self-insert fanfic, but that's because it's not informed by all the conventions of fiction publication, not because it was bad, it was definitely doing all the things it needed to do and I want to read more of it.

I'm so glad. I wouldn't want to lie to him about it, but I'd love to be able to encourage him, and he does seem to have an aptitude.

The description of being stuck in his throne was really vivid.

The King has stopped asking him to do that. It was a disaster every time.

At least he eventually catches on.

He is very capable in most respects.

And Fëanáro contradicts me if I suggest that parenting is not one of those respects.

I think everyone tries to explain Finwë's decisions to Fëanáro when sometimes it'd be wiser to say 'your father's making a mistake'. But - it feels like cowardice to say to a child 'your father's making a mistake and I'm not going to do anything about it', so no one does.

I have 'he's making a mistake and I have lingering royalty phobia' to fall back on...