I don’t think the Horcruxes were developed years in advance. I’d have to actually look over the books again to see where she stopped dropping clues but I don’t think it was by COS.
Pretty much all the shit she invented in book seven regarding wand ownership. People duel each other quite a bit throughout the series without their wands switching owners.
The Deathly Hallows was all made up near the end of the series, too. When Ron spots Harry’s cloak his reaction isn’t “Holy shit it’s the fucking Deathly Hallow!” it’s “Oh neato, those are pretty rare!” And yeah, you can tack on all this shit about “Oh, well, he thought it was a regular ol’ invisibility cloak that would lose its power with time- the Deathly Hallow would never lose its power” but that’s retarded. The idea that regular magical objects can replicate the power of these awesome artifacts, they just need to be replaced every decade or so seriously takes away all the impressiveness of the Hallows themselves.
She didn’t invent the word “Horcrux” until she got to writing the 6th book. However, she had thought about the idea of Voldemort having split his soul into parts before. I heard her talking about googling horcrux before the 6th book was published and being glad it got zero hits. She googled it later and it had tons of web sites.
She kept her original, really long epilogue until nearly the end of the writing process. She decided after writing the rest of the 7th book that it was too long and she re-wrote it, keeping the brief epilogue we see today.
Either she didn’t devise any of the plotlines years in advance, or she is a really, really horrible writer. I say that because none of the stuff across the books feels very tight or well planned out, and by contrast a lot of it has the feel of being made up on the fly. Much of it sufferes from the kind of thing that AClockworkMelon observed.
It’s okay to enjoy the books without inventing a mastermind behind the scenes.
Rowling definitely had this one planned out from the beginning. Remember, Dumbledore had borrowed the cloak despite the fact he “doesn’t need a cloak to be invisible”. All that came out in PS.
I don’t think Rowling is a horrible writer at all. The books are addictive reads and all it takes is a quick browse to see how good of a writer she is.
The horcruxes were devised pretty early on, at least. Maybe not named, and maybe not thought through crystal-clear, but I do remember in an interview (around the time of book 4), she said she was surprised that nobody had ever asked her why doesn’t Dumbledore try to kill Voldemort? Obviously she knew why, and it wasn’t just that Dumbledore was a good guy and they don’t do things like that.
Also the way the prophecy was worded makes me think she knew Harry had to
die to destroy Voldemort well before the 7th book.
I always thought that she had been edited poorly. It seems to me that the more she gained popularity, the more editing attention the books got, and the more choppy things become. For instance the Grindelwald question above. She ahs said that she alwasy thought of Dumbledore as gay. I suspect that she wrote that section as a love story, not just as two young boys being friends, and that she was out-voted by the stakeholders due to market fears. (They were right, sad to say, at least in the US.)
I always expected that professional editors would have a staff going over these things with a fne-toothe comb, looking for plot holes etc. That clearly didn’t happen here, and there’s no excuse for it.
I think it’s the exact opposite - the more popular and lucrative an author is, the more power she has to push back against editors. I think the later books suffered from a lack of editing, which is why they ballooned to 80,000 pages.
And AFAIK, editors aren’t looking for plot holes. Especially in a series - the author can always say “That’s something that will be cleared up in a later book.”
Harry-Ginny was definitely planned out from the beginning, and Ron-Hermione probably was. It’s the Shakespearean tradition that when a girl decides she wants a particular boy, she will get him eventually in the end, and Ginny had decided on Harry from the moment she was introduced.
I thought it was obvious that Ron would marry Hermione and Harry would marry Ginny, mainly because it takes Harry’s friends and makes them truly family, something he hadn’t had.
Anne Rice rather notoriously decided she wasn’t going to be edited anymore after the success of her first three vampire books. Rowling doesn’t strike me as the same sort of literary diva type, but she’s sold a lot more books than Anne Rice and thus has more weight to throw around.
But even if Rowling was an absolute lamb when it came to dealing with the editors, they’d have had good reason not to use their blue pencils too much. There must have been a lot of pressure to get the later books in the Harry Potter series to press as quickly as possible, first because there’s no point in putting off getting lots of money and second because of the danger of a manuscript being leaked online before the books went into print. I see that on her official website Rowling mentions being “under enormous pressure to edit [the 4th book] very fast” as an explanation for a minor error in the text.
A children’s/YA author whose books had been only a moderate success probably would have been pushed to keep them short for the benefit of younger readers, but there was little reason for the publishers to do this for the latter Harry Potter books. Kids were ready and willing to read enormous volumes about their favorite young wizard, so why bother keeping the page count down? IMHO books 4-7 would have benefited from having a lot of material cut, but it’s unlikely they’d have sold any better than they did so I can see why the publishers didn’t press the issue.