Writers have to plan
July 21st 2007 19:42
Of course I’m reading the latest Harry Potter – or rather, I’m just having a break from reading it in order to write this.
J K Rowling isn’t the world’s greatest stylist, in terms of writing English, but she gets the story across, and she keeps things clean and tidy so that usually you can read at a fair bat and not have to go back because you’d misunderstood something.
Perhaps more importantly, she’s a top example of someone who’s thoroughly prepared the ground before she’s started to write. It’s all very well having Harry Potter walk into your fictional life on a train, fully-formed, and then find that he’s surrounded by a number of other characters before you reach your destination. But knowing what to do with the characters is always a major task for a writer. I know this from experience.
The novel I was writing most recently began as a 32-page story written off the top of my head, in which half a dozen characters arrived without invitation and kept the impetus going. But then everything stopped, and I had to sit down and think about what these characters were doing. And think again, and try and get some type of ground to work from.
One of the characters changed from being a married man who was telling the story, to a man who was about to be ordained priest – and now his twin brother was telling the story – back to being a married man who was about to die from cancer any time. In the meantime his wife had left him and never appeared in the story at all. His brother stopped telling the story (it was too much effort for him) and let me tell it. And then his wife-to-be wanted to have certain sections of the story just to herself. The villain of the piece changed from an aloof character to someone with considerable charisma and much worse behaviour than he’d begun with.
It was the minor characters who changed less, although they had their ups and downs, especially when the ‘stars’ of the show insisted on altering the story more than a few times.
I don’t suppose Rowling had everything sorted out by the time she wrote The Philosopher’s Stone. For one thing, it’s much more complete in itself than some of the later stories, where each volume is more like an episode in a very long serial. But it’s plain that she knew more about the characters than we ever did. She knew that minor characters would play bigger roles later; that certain incidents would affect later events in another book; and that the tone of the books would darken increasingly. I’ve been constantly surprised at how things work in a jigsaw fashion throughout the books, how things are always clicking into place.
And not only that, she’s kept us in the dark about one important character – Snape. Even now, as we read the last book, we’re not entirely sure where his allegiances lie. That’s been a major achievement.
J K Rowling isn’t the world’s greatest stylist, in terms of writing English, but she gets the story across, and she keeps things clean and tidy so that usually you can read at a fair bat and not have to go back because you’d misunderstood something.
Perhaps more importantly, she’s a top example of someone who’s thoroughly prepared the ground before she’s started to write. It’s all very well having Harry Potter walk into your fictional life on a train, fully-formed, and then find that he’s surrounded by a number of other characters before you reach your destination. But knowing what to do with the characters is always a major task for a writer. I know this from experience.
The novel I was writing most recently began as a 32-page story written off the top of my head, in which half a dozen characters arrived without invitation and kept the impetus going. But then everything stopped, and I had to sit down and think about what these characters were doing. And think again, and try and get some type of ground to work from.
One of the characters changed from being a married man who was telling the story, to a man who was about to be ordained priest – and now his twin brother was telling the story – back to being a married man who was about to die from cancer any time. In the meantime his wife had left him and never appeared in the story at all. His brother stopped telling the story (it was too much effort for him) and let me tell it. And then his wife-to-be wanted to have certain sections of the story just to herself. The villain of the piece changed from an aloof character to someone with considerable charisma and much worse behaviour than he’d begun with.
It was the minor characters who changed less, although they had their ups and downs, especially when the ‘stars’ of the show insisted on altering the story more than a few times.
I don’t suppose Rowling had everything sorted out by the time she wrote The Philosopher’s Stone. For one thing, it’s much more complete in itself than some of the later stories, where each volume is more like an episode in a very long serial. But it’s plain that she knew more about the characters than we ever did. She knew that minor characters would play bigger roles later; that certain incidents would affect later events in another book; and that the tone of the books would darken increasingly. I’ve been constantly surprised at how things work in a jigsaw fashion throughout the books, how things are always clicking into place.
And not only that, she’s kept us in the dark about one important character – Snape. Even now, as we read the last book, we’re not entirely sure where his allegiances lie. That’s been a major achievement.
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