Children's books/Planning all seven (was: Potterverse Coherence)

[blpurdom]

No: HPFGUIDX 38868

--- In HPforGrownups at y..., Penny Linsenmayer <pennylin at s...> wrote:
> [sounds of soapbox being dragged out from underneath the desk ...]
> 
> The books are not, IMO, "meant" for children.  They have a 
> protagonist who is a child when the series begins.  Harry and his 
> friends will be adults (or late-term adolescents if you're unable 
> to stomach the notion that 17/18 yr olds are adults) at the end of 
> the series (if they survive).  The books have so far been marketed 
> to children, but I think even the publishers have now realized 
> that this series has unprecedented cross-generational appeal.  I 
> also think that the publishers are going to have a very, very hard 
> time marketing OOP to the "9-12" yr old set.  

Thank you, Penny!  This is something I think people forget far too 
often.  In a way, I'm not a bit sorry that she's taking a while to 
release book five, when Harry will be turning fifteen and then 
almost reaching his sixteenth birthday.  If it comes out in 2003, my 
kids will be turning 9 and 11 that year.  I plan to read the book 
first so I can tell where I may have to warn them of particularly 
scary or nerve-wracking events.  (My daughter put off reading PoA 
for a while because the depictions of the dementors on the American 
edition were rather eerie.)  If it takes a minimum of two years 
after that for book six, they'll be at least 11 and 13 when that 
comes out, and if book seven is on a similar schedule, by then 
they'll be 13 and 15, and aging along with the characters to the 
extent that I won't need to worry about the books throwing things at 
them that they can't handle.  Do any of us think the final showdown 
will be pretty?  I don't think so.  And isn't it in book five we're 
supposed to get the death that is very hard for her to write?

Hopefully, the NY Times, among other entities, will cease to think 
of HP as a children's series well before the series is completed.  I 
can think of many individual books which begin with a child 
protagonist and then follow the main character into adulthood, and 
these books are rarely considered children's books just because the 
protagonist starts off as a child.  The thing that sets the HP books 
apart from these types of books is that she is stretching out the 
maturation process over seven books, so within the scope of each 
early book Harry has only aged a year and is still technically a 
child.

> I do have some thoughts on David's post about coherence within the 
> series -- I do think she has a "master plan" David.  But I may not 
> have time to set out my thoughts until later today.  

Oh, it's clear she has a master plan.  Very early in the first book, 
we find that Hagrid has borrowed the flying motorcycle from Sirius 
Black.  He puts out this information to Dumbledore and McGonagall in 
a casual way that implies he hasn't been framed for killing Peter 
Pettigrew yet.  (Oddly, Dumbledore and McGonagall don't seem to 
think that if the Potters are dead it must be because Sirius 
betrayed them, so the implication is that at that time they didn't 
know that Sirius had been the Potter's Secret Keeper--and they also 
don't know that it was changed to Pettigrew.) Many of us probably 
thought the character of Sirius Black was just introduced in PoA 
unless we went back and reread the first book right after.  There 
are many other clear links between the books, and cross-book 
foreshadowing. 

Someone was comparing the HP books to "school" series, but the HP 
books remind me more of two different fantasy series: Jane Langton's 
books about the Hall family and Madeleine L'Engle's books about the 
Murrys.  The difference, however, is that one gets the impression 
that Langton and L'Engle created the characters for just their first 
books, coming up with a main problem for the plots and the methods 
for the main characters to solve the problems.  Each book was 
sufficient unto itself.  In subsequent books, the characters aged 
and evolved and new challenges were met, but one never got the 
impression that an overall arc was being followed, that all of the 
books in each series had been planned from the start.  When each of 
them had an idea for a new book with these characters, it was 
written.

In contrast to this method, JKR has a vision of the end of book 
seven.  Each book along the way has to be consistent with her final 
vision.  I'm not convinced that Langton envisioned even the second 
Hall book, "The Swing in the Summmerhouse," when she wrote, "The 
Diamond in the Window, or that L'Engle imagined "A Swiftly Tiltiing 
Planet" when she wrote "A Wrinkle in Time."  All of their books are 
well-done and the characters' developments from book to book are 
fascinating and realistic; but JKR's Harry will develop in a 
deliberate and not an accidental way, I'm convinced.  She knows 
exactly what she wants to do.  As far as details are concerned--from 
doing fanfic and now starting a new piece of original fiction, I 
know that the big events in a book are easier to keep track of and 
that the small things tend to evolve during the writing process.  
Some small things prove to be serendipitous accidents, and others 
become large stumbling blocks which require massive rewriting.  She 
knows she has a hyper-critical world-wide audience.  I am not going 
to begrudge her one minute of perfecting the next book.

--Barb

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/HP_Psych
http://www.schnoogle.com/authorLinks/Barb

The prequel is coming...come visit the Lost Generation...