Writing Archives | Page 2 of 10 | A.S. Akkalon

The problem with Harry Potter and why it doesn’t matter

Given his upbringing, Harry Potter wouldn’t have been a nice, well-adjusted kid. He would have been a nightmare. But that would have made a very different story.

Let me see if I’ve got this right.

We have Harry Potter, a kid who between the ages of 1 and 11 lived in a house with parental figures who hated, neglected, and emotionally abused him, and a sibling figure who bullied him.

I’m pretty sure he never got any love or affection at home.

He slept locked in a cupboard, for goodness sake.

We see no evidence he had any friends at school*, and, knowing kids, he probably got bullied for always wearing cast-off clothes that were too big for him.

* Okay, I haven’t read the books in years, so I’m mostly going by the movies. That still counts.

How emotions can help with your editing or lead you astray

When I’m editing, I use an emotional Geiger counter to tell which parts of my story are working. It often helps. Here’s how it can go wrong.

This is not a post of writing advice, because I don’t do those. This is a post of writing observation. They’re different. Trust me.

I read books first and foremost for the emotions they evoke: wonder, awe, hope, joy, dismay, despair, and all the other good ones.

Similarly, I write with the intention of evoking such emotions in the reader. The hard question is how do I know when I’ve succeeded.

Writers with a lot of craft knowledge and experience probably just know. I expect they don’t need to read their draft to know how the reader will react emotionally at each point.

Me? I’m not quite there yet.

Authors, whatever you do, don’t do this

I tweeted recently about something an author had done that made me feel cheated. My tweet went viral and the author’s behaviour received near-universal condemnation. So if you don’t want to infuriate your readers, don’t do what he did.

A few days ago I finished the book I was reading and trawled through my kindle for something new to read. I happen to have *cough cough* pages of books I’ve bought or downloaded free and haven’t quite got around to reading, so I knew I’d find something.

Sure enough, I came across a book I didn’t recall buying. The cover was attractive enough as a black-and-white thumbnail, and the first half sentence of blurb that my kindle displays was intriguing.

A post-apocalyptic world. Zombies. Yep, that sounded like some good light entertainment.

I began to read.

Is it unoriginal to write about dragons?

Sometimes I worry it’s unoriginal to write about dragons, then I realise that’s a ridiculous concern. Here’s why.

From time to time I have the uneasy feeling that when I write about dragons I’m being unoriginal.

Fantasy books can contain any fantastical creatures I can create, so why stick to this familiar beast? Am I taking the imagination out of a genre that lives based on its imagination?

After deep contemplation, I decided no.

Here’s why.

The only advice you need to write your first novel

Here’s the best advice out there on how to write your first novel. I know because I wrote it. You should still ignore it.

Eighty-three percent of people want to write a novel.*

* Like 97 percent of statistics, this number is made up.

But perhaps you do want to write a novel. You’ve always loved to tell stories, and fantastic lands and tortured characters clamour in your head. You must set them free in the world for the good of all mankind.

Being the intelligent person you are, you do some research on how to write a novel and are promptly overwhelmed.

Amazon gives over 2000 results for “how to write a novel”, Google gives nearly 800 million. It’s probably not feasible to read all those before dinnertime.

But fear not, because I have the only advice you need to write the masterpiece that’s fermenting in your head and bubbling out your ears.