Category: Fantasy

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A few more spooky links for Halloween:

Ghosts and Evil-Doers Need Love, Too

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I don’t tend to write scary stories, but after these tips from Cornelia Funke about creating a good ghost story, I’m tempted to give it a try. My favorite tip:

4. Give your ghost a life story
“Decide where your ghosts come from. How many are there? Do you tell the story of one or many? Were they once human? If yes, were they He or She? Grown up or child? How did they die? When did they live? You can make them historical characters like I did in Ghost Knight, which is so much fun and vastly inspiring. Or do you deal with a spirit of demonic origins? In short: Give your ghostly hero a biography. Imagine them so clearly that you feel them behind you. What does their voice sound like? Do they have one? Is their breath cold or hot?”

I like the reminder that ghosts aren’t just ghosts–they used to be living people, or maybe they’re demonic. But they have a backstory just like any other character.

If ghosts aren’t your thing, try this article about what makes a villain. Villains aren’t just mustache-twirling, cackling evildoers. They’re people, too, and have their own pain. I love this point about using stability/instability to ground your villain:

“So again: what upsets stability? How about something as simple as losing a loved one? How about being the target of hate because you accidentally brought about the death of your mother? No robots, no armies: just a broken heart that refuses to mend. And its breakage is what makes the motivation so sharp, so defined. Any prophet can march with an army, but it takes a harsher, personal edge to define yourself according to such local revenge. And there’s no reason this personal grievance can’t have a powerful, earth-shattering impact as big as a dragon army.”

It reminds me of one of my favorite quotes by Mary Shelley: “No man chooses evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.” Your villain should be on his/her own journey, and he/she probably thinks he’s doing what’s right–either for himself or for society in general.

So take a little time today to think about the evil and creepy figures in your stories. They deserve to be as complex as your heroes.

(image: JudeanPeoplesFront)

Growing up with Harry Potter

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From this New Yorker article about JK Rowling and her new novel:

“[Harvard scholar of children’s literature, Maria] Tatar’s students grew up with the books. “You can’t imagine what happens when I just say ‘Harry Potter,’ ” she said. “They’re transported. And they start to speak Harry Potter among themselves, and I feel like an alien.” Many of her students report that, as children, they learned about learning from the books’ depiction of Hogwarts. “It reshaped their understanding of what education was about—and what adults were about. They could recruit these adults and have them help landscape their lives.””

I grew up just before Harry Potter really took hold, and I remember lots of books and television shows that didn’t feature adults. Parents were generally absent and teachers were pretty nonexistent. I like Rowling’s presentation of adults like Dumbledore, Snape, and Mr. and Mrs. Weasley. They’re not perfect by any means. They have their own flaws and concerns. But Harry depends on and learns from them in very different ways. I think it’s good that kids growing up have a sense of what it means to relate to adults.

And then something I find a little alarming:

“In Edinburgh, I met Alan Taylor, a journalist and the editor of the Scottish Review of Books, who despaired of Rowling’s “tin ear” and said of her readers, “They were giving their childhood to this woman! They were starting at seven, and by the time they were sixteen they were still reading bloody Harry Potter—sixteen-year-olds, wearing wizard outfits, who should have been shagging behind the bike shed and smoking marijuana and reading Camus.””

First of all, who’s to say that these activities are all mutually exclusive? You only have to look at Tumblr to see that. Second, some of us we not hooking up at underground music concerts at 16–and that’s okay. Why does Taylor assume that there’s a “right” way to be a teenager, and that that way must involve a cliched form of rebellion?

There’s a lot in this article, so make sure to read the rest.

Happy Birthday, Harry (and Jo!)

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There are plenty of fictional characters who have birthdays. But the only one I remember is Harry Potter’s–July 31st, aka today. Okay, so Harry’s birthday figures pretty heavily into the plot, but I think it also has to with how Harry Potter is more than just a fictional character. He and Rowling’s other characters are parts of our lives.

At her Children’s Book-a-Day Almanac, Anita Silvey has a great post up about Harry Potter and why the series won so many readers. One point she makes:

“Not only does Harry have loyal and wonderful friends like Ron and Hermione, but he also encounters intriguing adults—Albus Dumbledore and Professor Snape for instance. After I read Harry Potter, I had a new life goal—some day I want to teach Defense Against the Dark Arts at Hogwarts. Millions of other readers have projected themselves into the stories in entirely different roles.”

The reference to adults in Harry Potter is a good one, and it’s not brought up often in children’s literature. It’s not only important to craft compelling young protagonists; the adults around them should be compelling as well. It provides even more opportunities for readers to connect with the series, and for readers’ opinions to change over time.

July 31 is also JK Rowling’s birthday. These days, it’s easy to think of Rowling as a wildly successful and beloved author. But Silvey points out that the path to publication was rough for her, too:

“Almost every publisher in England rejected the manuscript of Harry Potter; she had to persevere for years with a story that seemed to be only of interest to her. Finally, she found an editor new to the field in a small publishing house: Barry Cunningham of Bloomsbury Press was willing to take a chance on her book. For around $1,000 dollars he acquired the rights to publish the first book about Harry Potter, and when he called her in for an editorial meeting, he told her that she needed to get a job, because “Nobody, absolutely nobody, ever makes any money in children’s books.””

I have no idea how anyone could pass on Harry Potter. I was hooked on the first page! Still, it’s a great reminder that a) not everyone is going to love your book, no matter how amazing it is, and b) even the most awesome books get rejected. If Rowling decided to quit after a few rejection letters, we’d have been deprived of a fantastic series and a rejuvenation in children’s literature as a whole.

If you still want more HP fun and trivia, check out these ten facts you might not have known. And raise a glass of butterbeer in honor of Harry Potter, the boy who lived!

PS–One summer a friend and I decided we wanted to get an ice cream cake. We didn’t have any friends who were having birthdays and it was after the 4th of July but way before Labor Day. So we decided to celebrate Harry Potter’s birthday and asked the Dairy Queen people to write “Happy Birthday, Harry” in icing. Made the treat that much sweeter.

Darkness and Hope: the History of Fairy Tales

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Very interesting article about fairy tales by Joan Acocella over at the New Yorker. One part I found especially interesting:

“The main reason that Zipes likes fairy tales, it seems, is that they provide hope: they tell us that we can create a more just world. The reason that most people value fairy tales, I would say, is that they do not detain us with hope but simply validate what is. Even people who have never known hunger, let alone a murderous stepmother, still have a sense—from dreams, from books, from news broadcasts—of utter blackness, the erasure of safety and comfort and trust. Fairy tales tell us that such knowledge, or fear, is not fantastic but realistic.

I wonder if fairy tales have to be hopeful or realistic. Many tales end with the villain defeated (even if it’s a violent manner, ala The Goose Girl), which suggests hope. Maybe it’s not as bright as Zipes would like, but I think it balances with the realism and darkness Acocella mentions. Cruelty and violence are real. We need to confront the world and its violence. But I think folktales also reference how goodness can prevail, even if death is inevitable.

Make sure to check out the whole article through the link. Lots of engaging history and literary criticism.

(image: Grimm, Jacob and Wilhelm. The Fairy Tales of the Brothers Grimm. Mrs. Edgar Lucas, translator. Arthur Rackham, illustrator. London: Constable & Company Ltd, 1909, via SurLaLune Fairy Tales)