What is taking her so long to write that book, anyway? I’ve grown rather impatient.
From what I have read, she is a notorious perfectionist and has boxes of revisions, parts of chapters, research, and overall satisfaction with herself to contend with. Speaking as a writer myself, nothing sticks in your craw more than releasing something you are not really happy with out into the world.
She has it all mapped out pretty much but making the map come alive takes much care and patience. I can wait…
As for the OP, hooray for her.
Jo Rowling is also 4 months pregnant, which can slow you down as well.
That she stole the vast majority of her settings and characters from another person. I guess crime does pay.
I find it really awesome that a writer can make more than Madonna.
Gives me a bit of hope, really.
Before anyone feels compelled to point out the outcome of the trial over this: I know. The facts are in some dispute, but (to my eyes) it doesn’t look good for Rowling and her atrtistic integrity. That’s just my opinion.
Harry Lime - I’ve never heard anything about that. Do you have a link to a news story or something?
I presume Harry Lime is referring to the plagiarism court case which Rowling well and truly won last September?
Yes, that’s it. I have several other links. The facts are in some dispute. Rowling lost at another level. The other woman claimed that she (JKR) had lifted certain similar situations and characters from her earlier, less successful books. I’m not sure what happened here, to be honest. There were some troubling similarities between what was actually published and what showed up in the Potter books later.
If this were simply a case of someone brandishing an unpublished manuscript, I’d pay it little heed, but Stouffer had (unless I’ve been greivously misinformed) actually published work that predated the Potter books, and the similarities were drawn from them. I don’t know if Stouffer felt compelled to fabricate additional evidence or if the judge just went off on her. All I know is the parallels are more than a little troubling. I’m actually sort of sorry I brought it up, because it’s pretty ambiguous.
Hmm, this Stouffer woman seems kind of whiney about it all. And as far as I can see, the similarities are spread across a whole load of books, and they seem to be entirely based on tiny inconsequential things like words and names, which is pretty tenuous at best.
Not that I think JK Rowling is the greatest childrens book writer who ever lived - far from it, when has true quality ever been behind a major phenomenon? Very rarely, anyway - but she has written some great books, and I look forward to the story arc being completed.
I’d be just as excited about it even if she wasn’t a worldwide superstar, just like I am about many other authors.
I say good for her. She’s brought a lot of pleasure to a lot of people, adults and children.
Having read the Intro on realmuggles.com, the only similarities I can find are in some of the names: Nevil, Winkle (Winky?), Charlie, and Patter. The plot line of Stouffer’s story involves nuclear war, “civil unrest” and mutants.
I did find this, however: And so, the Ancient Book of Tales tells us-In The Year of the Purple Haze . . ."
Perhaps the estate of Jimi Henrix would like to get in on the suit.
Completely agree. I’ve pointed out a number of her writing problems in other posts.
Regarding this thread’s issue, it’s hard to imagine what extra incentive an author has earning $1 million vs. earning $77 million. The writing is bound to be the same. So who “wins” in this situation? Not the readers.
This fascination for “scoring big” has a negative effect on the rest of the publishing industry, too. Publishers are looking for the “next Harry Potter”, instead of writing that might be popular simply due to its very high quality.
I’d say that, generally, little kids aren’t at all concerned with grammar, structure and syntax. They just want a good story, a fun tale that entertains, with a simple, enaging plot.
If Rowling’s books, for all of their flaws, or Potter clones, can get kids excited about reading, I say hallelujah. If a child falls in love with reading, his tastes will naturally mature with age, and he’ll later move on to better-written books.
Sheesh… this Stouffer woman is really a whiner, isn’t she? Looks like the biggest similarity between Rowling’s books and Stouffer’s collection of work the use of the term “Muggles,” which means something completely different in the Harry Potter books.
There’s a better case to be made for similarities between Harry Potter and Neil Gaiman’s character Tim Hunter, from The Books of Magic, and yet you don’t see Neil chasing Rowling for intellectual property violations. That’s because he (I’ve asked him about this) sees the similarities, but also acknowledges the greater differences in the stories and the characters. Anyone who’s read both stories can see the differences… Stouffer’s problems sound like sour grapes in comparison.
I’m happy for Rowling and her success. She wrote the books because she had a good idea and had the dedication to do something with it. She’s inspired an awful lot of kids to read. While I personally think there are better childrens’ authors (Susan Cooper, for one), I can’t fault Rowling for telling stories that so many people love to read. In the age of cable television and the internet, it’s a tough sell to get a kid to pick up a book. She does it admirably.
Add me to the “good on her” camp.
Harry Lime:
I can’t say I’m impressed by the Stouffer evidence. She might have been more successful if she’d stuck to the basics - that the words Muggles, and Larry and Lily Potter, pre-existed - rather than trying to develop the scope of her claim, which I think only showed that both authors worked within a compendium of fantasy fiction cliches.
I don’t like Rowling’s work. It’s cosy middle-class fantasy (snotty little boy goes to stereotypical private school where he is good at everything) and it annoys me that people keep going on about the originality of ideas and names. For instance, the much-vaunted idea of a train at a normal station taking you somewhere magical was used by Lord Dunsany in his Edge of the World stories. The word “Hogwarts” appears in the classic Nigel Molesworth books by Willans and Searle. And so on.
I think the Potter marketing machine has also been extremely mean-spirited in its stamping on fan websites and its refusal to grant Carnforth Station (owners of the train) permission to display it.
I would like to point out, just as an aside, that Rowling did not seek out worldwide fame and riches. She just wanted to write for a living, and have her books enjoyed by her readers. Like most writers, I assume.
The juggernaut that has ensued probably surprises her more than it does others.
I wonder how much control Rowling has over this. I’ve read that sometimes unknown writers (which she was, many moons ago) are so eager to see their works published that they sign, and then are bound by, stinkers of a contract.
I don’t know the facts on this matter, but perhaps she signed away a lot of her rights, not knowing how wildly successful her books would be. Part of the agreement may not be to publicly criticize the decisions of The Publishing Empire, even though their decisions may set her teeth on edge privately. Perhaps she has no problems personally with the fan web sites, but her publisher is very possessive of the lucrative Harry Potter. Thus, their actions to stop the sites may be carried out in her name, but not necessarily at her initiative.
Any book that on the whole stimulates or entertains has got something going for it, no question, there.
The questions are whether a work could have accomplished even more, and whether a work instills bad habits at the same time it’s doing good things.
It’s a very personal subject with me, because I regret the influence some “kids books” had on me, these years later. True, Shakespeare is much harder to read than Nancy Drew and The Hardy Boys, but I’ve forgotten every word, every plot, of the dozens of those chapter books I read. Their utility getting me to where I’d eventually be artistically happy was: zero.
Worse, Nancy Drew taught the wrong lessons about the English language. About what a normal written conversation should sound like. About using words precisely. Rowling relies heavily on clichés, and uses words such as “very” incessantly and inappropriately, for example. Harry Potter is on the whole better written than Nancy Drew. In some ways, however, it’s worse. The plots of Nancy Drew – I’ll have to rely on distant memory – made sense. Harry Potter is full of contradictions, and kludges Rowling made to patch up problems she hadn’t anticipated.
It seems to me that teaching children not to think critically about what they read encourages them not to think critically in other situations. And there’s no excuse for exposing impressionable children to misused language.
I recently spent some time contracted as an editor for Microsoft. As an exercise, I tried editing a chapter of Harry Potter, treating it as though it were an assigned professional task. Among various discoveries was that about 1/4 of Rowling’s words were superfluous. Could be deleted with little or no change in meaning. A discovery that surprised me – I hadn’t been planning on looking at the time it took – was that the editing for the whole second book would have taken about 90 hours. More than two weeks. Probably Rowling would have taken at least that much time to evaluate my edits. Thus a proper editing process probably would have added a month or two to the production of the book – A non-trivial cost for the publisher and author. So, I suspect, part of what the public has been handed in Harry Potter is an economy story that just manages to avoid being so sub-par as to be unpublishable.
I’ve read an interview with Rowling where she said that she signed away marketing rights early on and doesn’t like what they’ve done with the property. No cites because it was an offline read, unfortunately.
My first pit thread was about the plastic sticks they were selling as Harry Potter wands at the supermarket down the road.