Run It Up the Flagpole…
I’ve been toying with the idea of using this space to post excerpts from some of the novels I’ve been working on. I haven’t completed anything, unlike my cousin-in-law, but that’s partially due to the fact that I’ve never settled on one thing for long enough. I’m sure that’s a bad habit for someone who wants to be a writer, but what can I say?
My first real undertaking in a writing capacity (outside of short stories – that is to say very short stories for school assignments, and term papers, which have been plenty long, but not the kind of think I intend to ever try to publish. The life of an essayist or biographer doesn’t really appeal to me. Actually, I don’t even know what that last sentence means. What do I know about the life of an essayist or biographer. What I really mean is that I like to read fiction and I want to write fiction) began several years ago. It’s a silly thing, since I’m 33, but I’m a bit obsessed with Harry Potter. This story really goes back to some time in the fall of 2000. I was married to my first wife at the time, and Alexa was about to turn 1. My (now ex-)father-in-law and I read a lot of the same books, so we often recommended books to each other. He had been going on for some time about the Harry Potter books and how I should give them a try. At this time the HP craze had not quite hit full power yet, but it was fast becoming a worldwide phenomenon. The 4th book was a few months old at the time, and he had just finished it. We were over for Sunday dinner and he was insisting yet again that he was sure I would enjoy them if I’d just give them a shot. I, in turn, scoffed yet again and said I had no interest in some dumb wizard books for kids. He seemed to drop it, but an hour later when I was on the way out the door, he stuck Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone in my hand and said, “Just try it.” I was sorely tempted to say, “No thanks,” and hand it back.
To be honest, I’m not entirely sure whether I’m glad I didn’t.
I went home and started to read it and it only took about 15 minutes for me to be completely hooked. In retrospect I sort of wonder why that was. The truth is that the first book wasn’t really that great. That’s probably a dumb thing for me to say, because I thoroughly enjoyed every word of it. I don’t know how else to explain it, though. I really don’t think it was a great book, but I really enjoyed it. I guess that’s not surprising since I have a whole DVD cabinet full of movies, the vast majority of which would be considered stupid by many (or maybe even most) people. Anyway, I tore through the first book in one sitting and the next day I went to the library and got the 2nd, 3rd, and 4th books. I read them over the next week and then sat to wait like all the people who had read the first for books and would eagerly await the next book. At that point I had enjoyed each of the books more than the one before, but I wasn’t anywhere near obsessed with the series. I wouldn’t rank any of the first four Harry Potter books (then or now) among, say, my top 25 or probably even top 50 favorite books. I liked them quite a lot, though, and I was sure I would read the 5th book as soon as it was published.
So, a little more than two and a half years later, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix was published and I read it the first day it was available. It’s been my experience that, among those who have read the entire series, the most commonly claimed favorite seems to be the Prisoner of Azkaban, followed by the Goblet of Fire. A lot of people seemed to really dislike the Order of the Phoenix, calling it dark and depressing. As it turns out, I happen to agree with that assessment; I just don’t think that makes it a bad book. I thought it was quite a lot better in terms of writing quality than any of the first four and I enjoyed it far more than the previous book, which, as I said, I really enjoyed. In my opinion both the 6th and 7th books continued the trend of each book being better than the previous, but that’s not germane to this post.
But something different happened after the 5th book. Actually, two things happened: first, I was fully hooked on anything Harry Potter at that point. I bought Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them as well as Quidditch Through the Ages, which, if you don’t know about these, JK Rowling wrote them under the names of peripheral characters from the Harry Potter universe for charity. They don’t further the story in any way, but they’re entertaining supplemental reading if you’re a Harry Potter junkie like I’ve become. And second, after reading the first four books consecutively and then waiting two and a half years for the next one, I felt a semi-severe letdown at the knowledge that it was going to be at least two more years until the 6th book would show up. I had resigned myself to that fact and began to seek solace in something else to read that might capture my attention in the way that these books for young teens had.
Then one day I got an email, and I can’t even remember who sent it to me, but it was a link to a story called the Naked Quidditch Match. I was hesitant to click on the link at first, but I figured that I was old enough to police myself, so if it turned out to be something inappropriate, I could simply navigate away from the page. The story is a fanfic. If you’re not familiar with the term fanfic or fan fiction, you can read about it here. So I read this story and I loved it. Not just its content, but its unique format and the ideas that make it go. I got curious and wanted to know where it came from. The site I found at that time has long since gone the way of the Dodo, and I’m not even that sure of its name anymore. I think it was called Gryffindor Tower, and the objective was that all the stories there were fanfics (if you didn’t click that link and you still don’t know what they are, you need to, or the rest of this won’t make much sense) whose themes all centered around the idea that Harry Potter would eventually fall in love with Ginny Weasley and they would get married and live happily ever after. As I recall, the requirement for posting on that site was only that the story had to have Harry/Ginny as a theme. Some of the stories took place immediately after the Order of the Phoenix (or after a previous book, branching out from JK Rowling’s canon at whatever point its author chose), while some of them took place further into Harry’s future.
And with that I was instantly a Harry Potter fanfic junkie as much or more than I was an actual Harry Potter junkie. As with any site where almost anyone can be a contributor, there was a lot of worthless crap posted at Gryffindor Tower. There was also a lot of really good stuff there, though. Many of the writers couldn’t write very well, while some just couldn’t type very well, but if they could tell a story in an engaging way, I usually gave them a shot. Some of the works were just short stories, lasting only a few thousand words, while others were novel length creations, theoretical replacements (in an alternate universe) for future JK Rowling novels. A few months after I discovered it, the powers that be (were?) at Gryffindor Tower decided to disband the site. They referred everyone (readers as well as authors) to fanfiction.net, which was not nearly as good, but still a place where one could post and/or read fanfiction. If you follow that link you’ll see that the world of fanfiction is for a whole lot more than just Harry Potter. However, if you click on the Books link on fanfiction.net’s homepage and browse through the categories you’ll notice that there are several thousand stories for all the many non-Harry Potter categories combined, while there are somewhere in the neighborhood of 350,000 Harry Potter fanfics on that site. Needless to say, I had found another source to spend a lot of my free time.
After several months of reading at Gryffindor Tower and then another couple of months of reading the Harry Potter section at fanfiction.net, I had a thought. It was related to the thoughts in my earlier post about wanting to be a writer, but on a slightly different tack. Instead of “I could do that, too,” which is what Robert B. Parker’s Spenser novels made me think, I thought, “I could do better than this. This stuff sucks!” As I said, a lot of it was very good, including a few that I would hope to be able to compare myself to someday. But a lot of it was either a good idea gone very wrong or just not very good writing at all. I had developed a few theories about where I thought the series ought to go after the events at the end of the Order of the Phoenix (with Sirius dying and with the whole prophecy thing), so I decided it was time to stop reading all the other fanfics (which I, of course, did not do – I kept reading and still do from time to time these days), and get to work on my own.
This post is too long for its own good, but I don’t know how to split it up in a good way… so I’m ending here and picking it up in the next post.
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