JKR's writing as craft (Was FAQF)

[prefectmarcus at yahoo.com]

No: HPFGUIDX 23880

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., "Jim Ferer" <jferer at y...> wrote:
> Prefectmarcus:"  'That's not a Quick Quotes Quill, is 
> it?' 'No sir. Those things are garbage.' Does anybody reading this 
> recognize the reference?"
> 
> Actually, we probably all do. There's a lot of people on this list 
who 
> know this tale as well as anyone anywhere.

Then would you please be so kind as to tell me the author and the 
title?  I would appreciate it.

  
> Prefectmarcus:"The rest [fanfic] were very forgettable.  So I 
suspect, 
> at least for me, there is more to it that just good characters.  
True, 
> they are an essential ingredient, but certainly not the only or the 
> most important one."
> 
> Most fanfics don't give us anything good in characterization, and 
the 
> writing is usually execrable. The writing is important.
> 
> What do we spend our time talking about so much? The characters. The 
> Trio. Malfoy. Snape. Dumbledore. People a hundred years from now 
will 
> know who they are, as they know who Hamlet, Macbeth, and Sherlock 
> Holmes are.
> 
> There's been stories about apprentice wizards before, and about kids 
> who had a target on their backs before. There's books about 
> combinations of all these elements, and many of them are well 
written. 
> But they don't have Harry Potter in them, do they?

Jim, I am not arguing that good characterization is not important.  It 
is.  However, I do not believe it is the only or most important 
element in a story.

Take a look at "A Christmas Carol" by Dickens.  Surely if any story 
could be called a classic, that one is.  But what character, with the 
possible -- possible -- exception of Scrooge, could be describe as 
anything more than two dimentional?  Now I am talking the book, not 
the zillions of adaptations attempting to breath life into cardboard 
cutouts.  Most of Dickens characters are on the shallow side.  Oliver 
Twist is another example. 

For the opposite view, how many movie reviews have you read that 
essentially said, "In spite of the valient efforts of Joe Blow, the 
movie was a lost cause?" Joe Blow was working his hardest to provide a 
good, three-dimentional character, but the material stunk.  

> J.K Rowling is a fine writer. I've always thought so. Her stories 
> wouldn't be what they are if the ideas didn't make it to the page so 
> clearly.  But the language she uses isn't art by itself, as it can 
be 
> with writers like Tolkien, Twain, or Patrick O'Brian.

I beg to differ.  An art teacher once told me -- I am not an artist -- 
that most people think that the pinnacle of artistic endevour is 
photo-realism.  That is a mistaken notion.  All the greats achieved 
that at a very early stage.  What the greats end up striving for is 
minimum of effort.  He illustrated this by showing a painting done 
hundreds of years ago by some great artist whose name even I 
recognized.  It was a picture of a man.  He turned it upside down and 
the painting became just two or three seemly random splotches of 
color.

Did you ever watched Bob (Bill?) Ross?  Sadly, he's dead now.  My 
family used to call him "The Doodder Man".  He started every half hour 
show with a blank or nearly blank canvas.  Using a knife, a fan brush, 
a house brush, and a small brush he would throw up a dab of paint 
here, a scrap there, dooder this, dooder that.  By the end of the 
program he had a stunning landscape you'd swear took hours to achieve.

Never denigrate the simple things.  They are generally a lot harder to 
achieve than the complex.  

Marcus