JKR Brought it Upon Herself

[muscatel1988]

No: HPFGUIDX 176785

--- In HPforGrownups at yahoogroups.com, "va32h" <va32h at ...> wrote:
>
> Well I agree and disagree.  Actual dates are irrelevant - I don't 
> know why JKR bothered with them on the Potters' gravestones either. 
> Nick's deathday cake in CoS was written before the series became 
> insanely popular, I don't fault JKR for not realizing how obsessive 
> and nitpicky her readers would become. 
> 
> But in a larger sense - we have to be able to trust the author.  To 
> feel that what she's telling us is important.  When the author makes
> a series of factual mistakes, it undermines that trust.  

Mus concurs:

I agree entirely with this.  It's possible in Wuthering Heights to 
work out a very strict calendar for pretty much every event, although 
it's not absolutely necessary for the larger story arc.  But it shows 
an author at work who is meticulous.

You see, I believed JKR when she said that the plotting had taken 
years, that she had notebooks and notebooks full of detailed workings-
out.  I assumed that she would have drawn up lists of what students 
were in which year (Flint, anyone?), that she'd know what properties 
she'd explicitly assigned to each spell and potion (how long *does* 
Polyjuice last, given that it was relevant for the plot in CoS and 
GoF?).  I took her at her word when she said that she'd taken care 
(months of it) to rewrite when plot holes reared their ugly heads.

I feel rather like I would feel if I were supervising the work of a 
student who led me repeatedly to believe that accuracy was paramount, 
only to read the submitted work and find it full of inaccuracy.  Yes, 
the errors would annoy in themselves, but I'd also feel that I'd been 
misled as to what the student was actually doing all along.  The 
implicit contract that JKR made with her reader (even if there were 
only ever one, even if there were never any) was that small details 
mattered, because she had shown us that they did - it was her choice 
to do so. If I had been reading a book where the small stuff didn't 
matter, then I would not feel let down.  But she told - and more 
importantly showed - us that it did. 

She knew from early on that numbers were not her forte - why then did 
she not say to her editors that they needed to check them?  Why, when 
her editors *must* have known that numbers might be a problem, did 
they not go over them with a fine-toothed comb? 

The end product reads like something that *wasn't* carefully put 
together.  The numbers are, as Alla says, not crucial to the plot, 
but they are symptomatic of something more pervasive.  

Mus