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Sep. 25th, 2012 01:27![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
sekritomg"She has a reputation for reserve: for being likable but shy and thin-skinned, and not at all comfortable with the personal impact of having created a modern myth, sold four hundred and fifty million books, and inspired more than six hundred thousand pieces of Harry Potter fan fiction, a total that increases by at least a thousand stories a week." [source]
I like how this is somehow seen as just as significant as the actual books.
I like how this is somehow seen as just as significant as the actual books.
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Date: 2012-09-25 13:28 (UTC)no subject
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Date: 2012-09-28 22:43 (UTC)I can do that, p. 1
Date: 2012-09-29 07:18 (UTC)But, what I am is a very good editor, and man, she just needs an editor. Basically I think the problems break down like this:
1. Tied to unsustainable academic calendar. She feels obligated to have the same structure in every book. For kids this is cool because they can look forward to reading about Christmas in every book, but it forces the novels into this repetitive pattern where something big or sinister happens right before the school year, then the mystery amps up and drops off for like five or six months while HHR kind of putter around kissing/reading/snarking. Then around finals time, the drama kicks in again and things finish very quickly and abruptly. This creates good suspense on the first reading, but it makes re-reading not that exciting because nothing really happened between October and June. This works well in the first book because she needs that time to world- and character-build, and I even think it makes POA and GOF pretty fun reads. But the rest of the time it's a fairly unsustainable system, to the point where in DH HHR are basically on the Hogwarts academic schedule even though they're not actually at school, which really hurts the book. There's no reason they had to wait to plot their final attack, like, at the end of the school year. That could have shaved off a hundred pages.
2. Shift in tone. I think the first book is really, really genius for a children's book, and even COS and POA are pretty good and fun because the tone is less monumental and it feels more like a boarding school caper. But around the time she took three years to write GOF the books became a massive, worldwide phenomenon and started entering the adult lit canon. I feel like maybe she scaled things up to keep that going. The books get exponentially longer and begin to deal with subject matter that really isn't for kids. I'm not a kid and I'm also not opposed to kids reading about (mild high school-age) sex and death, I think they should, but the change in tone halfway through is disconcerting.
3. Lack of planning. On that note, while I don't doubt that she had her basic plan down from the outset, there was a sense of expectation that a lot of these little things throughout the series would somehow come to make sense, and at the conclusion, what she offered was paltry. So Dumbledore was actually calculating, insensitive, and angst-ridden, but like … you don’t learn that until the very end, and there’s no clue to what’s motivating him for most of the series. Then his back story is told in the final installment through newspaper clipping/biography excerpts, which is the definition of telling, not showing. You can’t get me to believe that she knew what a horcrux was when she wrote COS. There would have been some kind of comment earlier than book 6 about “ah yes, horcruxes, right” and then Harry forgets about it for four books. Or the Deathly Hallows – WTF even is that? If it’s important enough to center around the entire book, shouldn’t the themes, if not the story, if those three brothers’ encounter with death have entered the story before the final book? These are the kind of things that should have been referred to offhand if not explained, you know? The last book is totally anticlimactic. She’s good as building up hints about some great war coming, in the conversation at the start of HBP with the two ministers, mysterious disappearances … but then it seems this war has no actual repercussions. Nobody Harry really cared about or loved died in this struggle.
And it's late so I'm not gonna edit this
Date: 2012-09-29 07:19 (UTC)4. Weird values! Only bad people are ever ugly in these books, and the overall message over and over again seems to be that there's something precious about maternal love. The most heroic woman in the series, Ron's mom, has like 29 children, and the significance of Lily's sacrifice is hammered the fuck home. The only redemption for an actual Death Eater, really, is for Draco's mom, who's moved to protect Harry not because she is opposed to Voldemort's plans to kill him, but simply because she wishes to know whether Draco's alive. (I think this was how it played out?) Contrast this to, say, Bellatrix, who is a loveless, childless monster, but who isn't given credit for being a powerful sorceress or competent threat, unlike most of Voldemort's male goons. Add to this the fact that every character meets and falls in love with their soul mate by age 12 and they all get married and have children by 20 -- it's just weird to me.
5. Lack of editing. There are just sequences that are totally unnecessary, that a writer who wasn’t selling millions of copies regardless of content would not have been able to keep in there. All of these holidays with Ron’s family and visits with Hagrid — these are emotional touchstones for readers, but a lot of them don’t further the plot and make no sense from a storytelling perspective.
But, I like the books! Or I like Harry Potter as a thing, or something. So I guess you can count me as someone who is a fan of the idea and the world she created, rather than her writing in the series. I think if you, like, got a really good editor and streamlined them into a tight, say, four-volume series of 400 to 500-page novels, you’d have something really brilliant. And I thoroughly enjoyed reading every moment until, like, I got to the epilogue. But then I sat back and sort of went, hey, wait a minute.