Snape! Snape! Snape! Snape! Loverly Snape! Wonderful Snape!

[lupinlore]

No: HPFGUIDX 148224

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "nrenka" <nrenka at ...> wrote:
>
<SNIP>
> 
> Maybe JKR honestly thinks that she's shown it well enough?  After 
> all, she seems to have been genuinely poleaxed by the shipping wars, 
> past a certain point--she thought she made *that* one absolutely 
> crystal clear, and yet a significant number of people chose to invest 
> in a different reading.  Being absolutely direct tends to end up 
> looking like preaching to the audience, and there's a classic 
> hallmark of what's generally considered 'bad writing' in the modern 
> novel.  There are any number of other things which she's generally 
> counted on us-the-readers 'getting', and gets more than a 
> little 'wot?' about some of the questions that she gets.
> 


I agree that this is definitely one of JKR's problems.  She really is a 
wonderful example of how what she thinks she writes, what she really 
writes, and what people read are three very different things.  I also 
think she suffers from the problem that she knows her characters so 
well that statements and actions that seem absolutely clear to her are 
anything but to readers -- the best example possibly being her horrible 
mistep with regard to Dumbledore's speech at the end of OOTP.

However, I would tend to disagree that being absolutely clear is always 
a hallmark of bad writing.  Rather, being absolutely clear in a way 
that is "preachy" is bad writing, but there are ways of being very 
clear without preaching.  I think Tolkien was very clear about his 
opinions of Gollum and Saruman, but made those opinions clear in ways 
that don't strike most readers as preaching.

Thus my preference for karmic retribution.  This is the way you can 
make yourself, as a writer, very clear as to themes and judgments 
without being preachy.  And I do think that JKR is under the burden in 
Book VII of making herself very, indeed absolutely, clear on a great 
number of important subjects, perhaps especially subjects having to do 
with Snape and his abusive ways.


Lupinlore