(no subject)

[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.

Comments

I can do that, p. 1

[sekrit-omg.livejournal.com]

Ah, man, I don't really know that much about writing. I've never taken a creative writing class (I mean, okay, I took 3/4 sessions of "The Art of Erotic Writing" at an adult learning annex once) and haven't taken an English class in five years.

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.