As writers, every one of us dreams of writing
the “New Harry Potter”.
C’mon, admit it – don’t you wish you could come up with the
just the right...the right...the right WHAT?
Listen. My kids – at the time of the first book, they were
six and ten – eventually heard me read, then picked up and read, the HP books.
My father – who was SEVENTY when he picked up the first book – read and enjoyed
the entire series as well. How is it possible that people of such disparate
ages could read and enjoy the same books?
While it’s not as if it has “never” happened before – adults
and kids were reading TREASURE ISLAND, THE WIND IN THE WILLOWS, and THE
CHRONICLES OF NARNIA long before JK Rowling gave literary birth to Harry Potter
– what are some of the aspects of the phenom we might pick up as writers and
apply to our own writing?
There are literally tens of thousands of pages of analysis
of the books, ranging from fan sites to academic: “Despite being children's books, the Harry
Potter novels have also been subject to serious social scrutiny, with
studies of the series' political intricacies performed by columnists, professors
and doctoral students alike. As of 2007, the catalog of the Library of Congress
has recorded 21 volumes of criticism and interpretation, and at least seven
master’s dissertations and 17 doctoral theses have been devoted to the Harry
Potter books. Seriously.” (http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee133)
This was in 2007 – how many MORE are there seven years later? Oh, by the way, these
archives also hold an essay entitled: “Quidditch, Imperialism and the
Sport-War Intertext.”
Really...
I’m not looking
for anything quite so esoteric, though a read-through of the doctoral
dissertations might shed some interesting light on HP, I’m looking for
practical, lay-person methods that might improve my writing.
One of the things
that comes up most often is that the books include HUMOR. This is hardly a new
tool for grabbing a reader’s attention. In fact, in their movie format, they
might even be classified as dramedy – “Comedy-drama (also known as dramedy, tragicomedy, comedic drama, or seriocomedy)
is a genre of [literature,] theatre, film, and television that combines
elements of comedy and drama, having both humorous and sometimes serious
content.” My favorite example of this is MASH – in which nearly every
episode had a serious message and a humorous story line.
Another thing people mention often is that the books deal
with racism obliquely, never coming out exactly and saying “don’t be a racist” –
and never actually dealing with Human races, but confronting the whole issue of
pure blooded wizarding families and kids who come from mixed-blood families is
a deep issue that plays a major role in driving all seven books. Racism still
haunts us. We want to see it dealt with even when WE aren’t the ones doing the
dealing – we’re just reading about it.
Lots and lots of people comment on how Harry Potter and the
rest of the characters “felt as if they were alive”. My rebuttal for that is
that they had BETTER seem alive after a million words of story! Realistically
however, most of us will never be allowed to have a million words to make our
characters come alive and the truth of the matter is that neither did JK
Rowling. By the time she reached the million words, the world was gripped by
Pottermania. I worked at Barnes & Noble during the release of three of the
books – ORDER OF THE PHOENIX, THE HALF-BLOOD PRINCE and THE DEATHLY HALLOWS.
People were desperate to read the books before Rowling reached 500,000 words!
Why did people fall for Harry? Because he was an “every man” (or boy) who was
picked on mercilessly by his “parents”, his “brother”, relatives, neighborhood
kids, and his classmates (though we never see that, we assume it’s true). Every
single person who read a Harry Potter book – and I make absolutely no
distinction of culture here – had been picked on by someone, somewhere, at some
time. The connection was instant – what might be called the “poor me” syndrome –
is literally universal. Translation of the books into at least 70 languages
should be argument enough that the syndrome is universal.
Two other aspects twine together to form another frequently
mentioned aspect of the books: people working for good who are so far “under
cover” that for all intents and purposes, they are evil and the idea that it’s
OK to admit you were on the wrong side and you can switch over to the right
side…but there will be a price to pay. These twined concepts might be shortened
to “deception and disloyalty are OK under the right circumstances”. Wrapped
loosely around this, I might add the moral imperative that recognizes that
murder is wrong – but right under certain circumstances.
So how do I make usable tools out of all of that?
1)Use humor to leaven tragedy.
2)Deal with real issues imperceptibly.
3)Use the “poor me” syndrome.
4)Deception, disloyalty, and murder are usually wrong – but infrequently
right.
OK – I’m going to
go apply this to the story I’m working on now and then analyze stories I’ve
written that have been published, and finally take a long look at the pieces I’ve
written recently.
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