Post by Tennant StuartPost by Troels ForchhammerPost by Tennant StuartRowling's failure, which ruined all of the later books, was that
she refused to listen to her characters and just stuck to her
outline.
Hear! Hear!
Thankyou, Troels.
You're welcome -- I do think that you are spot-on in that analysis.
Incidentally ... weren't you keeping a record of favourite volume?
You might like to know that my own perceptions have shifted
slightly, and while ten years ago, I thought that GoF won over PoA
by a small lead, these have now turned so that these days I find
that PoA is the best book in the series, winning over GoF by a
rather small margin :-)
Post by Tennant StuartPost by Troels ForchhammerWell ... I might not say that this was her _only_ failure, but
all other failures in the HP books certainly pale in comparison
:)
Could you please explain this authorial concept to Victor Dix et al?
I am afraid that I have not been keeping my Potter-lore current for
the past ... gosh, it'll be something like 7 years now ... but while
I would not presume to explain thing _to_ anyone (as in 'laying down
the law'), I don't mind trying to explain my thoughts in a bit more
detail :)
Certainly anyone who followed the publication of the Potter books (I
think I joined the craze in '01 and stuck at it through to the end,
though already the sixth volume did much to lessen my interest) will
remember the stories about Rowling's master plan. How she had
already written up the final chapter (which was to have ended with
the word 'scar'), and had everything laid out beforehand.
As the series developed, however, her characters developed too, and
in some cases they moved in directions that were not consistent with
actions that she needed them to do in order for her to follow her
master plan. One example is the case of Ron abandoning the two
others during their horcrux hunt, where I think that the influence
of the horcrux is hopelessly inadequate as motivation for this. Ron,
as he had come to be portrayed in the previous books, was almost a
paragon of loyalty, and it would have required a much greater
motivational force to make this character, as he had evolved,
abandon his friends.
I could mention several cases from, particularly, the last two
books, where characters are forced by Rowling's master plan to
behave in ways that are inconsistent with their characters as they
had evolved, which unfortunately weakens the overall verisimilitude
of the the series and of course particularly of the last couple of
books.
It is curious that while authors of fantastic fiction (myth, legend,
fantasy or science fiction alike) can bend and break the laws of
physics (and other natural sciences) more or less as they please (as
long as they have the skill to do so in ways that create a new set
of self-consistent 'rules' by which the author then has to abide), I
have not come across any author who would bend or break the
psychological 'rules' that determine human behaviour in the same way
they do with physics.
This, I believe, has to do with the psychological mechanism of
motivation -- the inner agency and causation, which is at the heart
of stories. If the characters do not behave in ways that are
consistent with our experience of human psychology, we tend to find
the story unbelievable, and unfortunately this is the mire that
Rowling got herself into, when she decided to squeeze characters
that had evolved into something different, into the master plan that
she had created before even starting on the characters' evolutionary
journey.
This is not, I hasten to add, the case in all details. Even I have
heard rumours of changes that she did make (also going beyond
changing the final word of the series), but it does seem to have
been the case with certain key concepts in the last parts of the
overall plot -- it may be that these were ideas that she had become
too enamoured with for her to be able to change them, or there may
be other reasons that she couldn't see what damage she was doing to
her own story, I don't know: all I could do was to observe the
damage and so lose the passion that I had had for the books.
--
Troels Forchhammer
Valid e-mail is <troelsfo(a)gmail.com>
Smile
a while
ere day
is done
and all
your gall
will soon
be gone.
- Piet Hein, /Advice
at Nightfall/