Eww and Ick

[andrewducker]

Some thoughts on writing continuing works, brought together by reading the latest Potter and talking to Alan Moore. I'm not going to give anything serious away, but if you like to be 100% spoiler free past page 250 then don't click.

If you were planning on writing a lengthy serial work, be it 32 issues of comic, 6 films or 7 books, could you resist the urge to start off with as much mass appeal as possible and then slowly draw the reader in to places they really wouldn't have gone if they'd been warned at the beginning?

Alan Moore's done this with Promethea - started off with a Wonder Woman figure and then taken her on a series of magical voyages that have slowly become the point of the comic, until you're reading a comic about the Kaballa, the Tarot and the meaning of magic and reality and superheroics don't really seem to fit the tone at all any more.

I just had to put down Ordr of the Phoenix for a moment - partially because I wanted to write this, and partially because it was just plain unpleasant. Not "American Psycho" unpleasant, but definitely reminiscient of the feeling I used to get from early Stephen King, someone excercising a gruesome imagination in order to take a normally internal pain and make it external.

Now, it may be that JK is just taking the book into more adult places as she goes along, and that she recognises that 15 is an age associated with lack of power, frustration and a growing realisation that school isn't actually a preparation for real life so much as a holding pen for children. But part of me wonders if she had things she wanted to get across from the very beginning, and knew that the best way to get it across to an audience was to start off nice and easy and then slowly drag the reader into the less pleasant areas of the world inside her head.

One wonders what it was like for fans of the Beatles who adored "Love me Do" and "Please Please Me" and suddenly found themselves listening to Sergeant Peppers.

Are these kidnappings planned, or is it really much simpler than that, artists producing the work they want to/have to at each stage and making something that only looks like a pathway in hindsight?

Comments

[shannon_a]

I haven't read OotP and don't expect to until it hits paperback, but as a writer myself I can tell you that the sort of evolution (over a long-term) you describe is rarely planned. She's been hacking away at these books for, what, six or seven years now? Imagine where you were seven years ago, and whether you'd write the same thing then that you would now.

If nothing else, I'm sure Rowling has a considerably different self image than she did before the first HP book was published. There's probably some new self-confidence, clearly a huge dose of arrogance, maybe some cynicism about what success actually means. Of course that'll cause her to write in different ways.

I'm actually much more surprised by the writers that manage to maintain a similar tone through a protracted series of books, like I think Sue Grafton has with her alphabet mysteries.

[andrewducker]

I'm sure that the details have changed significantly since she started writing the books, she's certainly a better writer now than she was then.

However, from the start she's insisted that she had the whole thing planned out since before she started writing the first one, and it would surprise me if she didn't have a good idea of the changes in tone of the books or the revelations that would occur in each one.

[onceupon.livejournal.com]

I was writing something about these changes in my own journal and then I read this in your journal too, so I know I'm not crazy. *grin*

How far into it are you?