{"id":15531,"date":"2012-08-24T06:30:21","date_gmt":"2012-08-23T18:30:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/?p=15531"},"modified":"2012-08-23T21:44:09","modified_gmt":"2012-08-23T09:44:09","slug":"more-thoughts-on-risking-delight-plus-what-if-in-the-context-of-harry-potter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/2012\/08\/24\/more-thoughts-on-risking-delight-plus-what-if-in-the-context-of-harry-potter\/","title":{"rendered":"More Thoughts on “Risking Delight”—Plus, “What If?” In The Context of Harry Potter"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>On Wednesday, I posted on “Risking Delight—The Awesomeness of Diana Wynne Jones & ‘Power of Three'”<\/em><\/a> in which I said:<\/p>\n

“When I closed the covers (of “Power of Three”), I felt thoroughly satisfied. Yet I also felt something more, something as important to me as a writer as it is as a reader. The US poet, Jack Gilbert, wrote (in \u2018A Brief for the Defense\u2018) that: \u201cWe must risk delight.\u201d On re-reading Power of Three<\/strong> I experienced delight both as a reader and as a writer reading another author\u2019s work. This suggests to me, quite powerfully, that Diana Wynne Jones risked delight when she wrote the book \u2014 and that, I believe, is something all those who wish to be an author must do, every time we pick up our pen (or keyboard) and write.”<\/em><\/p>\n

Since then I’ve been thinking some more about this in the context of a recent conversation around that perennial question: ‘What made the <\/em>Harry Potter<\/strong> books so popular, first with kids and then with readers of all ages?’<\/em><\/p>\n

Of course we would all love to know so that we could then replicate the phenomenon and the kerzillions. And of course we never will know, for sure, because there’s just a little bit of magic to success like that—an alchemy of the moment as it relates to both the story and its readers. In other words, even if one had the exact recipe, replicating it at any other time in space might not result in the same outcome. We all know this, I suspect, in our secret hearts, but it’s fun to speculate anyway and a great way to while away a rainy afternoon…<\/p>\n

So we duly whiled… (Yes, it really is “while away” not “wile”—check it out if you don’t believe me.) And one of the aspects of Harry Potter<\/em> that I mentioned, not necessarily as the ‘secret ingredient’ but simply as something that always struck me profoundly about the early books in particular, is the extent to which they include a sense of delight. In Harry Potter<\/em>, the “risk” taken is also strongly connected to the delight of “What If?”<\/p>\n

\"\"<\/a>Have you ever noticed how often a group of kids together will say that? “What if?” “What if the world was not as we see it but rather like this, or this, or that?”<\/em> It’s a kind of magic in and of itself, the magic of possiblity—<\/em>and Harry Potter<\/em> is full of it:<\/em><\/p>\n

“What if there was a boy with a lightning bolt on his forehead and he lived in a cupboard under the stairs?”<\/p>\n

“What if your mail came by owl?”<\/p>\n

“What if there were a school for magic<\/em>, not just normal old school, and you got your school supplies from a place as wonderful and mysterious as Diagon Alley?”<\/p>\n

“And caught the train by rushing through a brick pillar onto Platform 9 3\/4\u00a0 in the middle of what is otherwise a perfectly normal train station?”<\/p>\n

What if, what if, what if<\/em>… And it’s all about delight—the delight of the unexpected and the magical in the middle of the ordinary and everyday, the affirmation that there really might be a little bit of magic still found in this world, not just by stepping through the camphor and fur coats of a wardrobe and into the otherland of Narnia…<\/p>\n

Not a secret ingredient, since it is there for all to see, but part of the delight of Harry Potter<\/em> nonetheless—and I suspect of fall the great children’s writers, not least Diana Wynne Jones.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On Wednesday, I posted on “Risking Delight—The Awesomeness of Diana Wynne Jones & ‘Power of Three’” in which I said: “When I closed the covers (of “Power of Three”), I felt thoroughly satisfied. Yet I also felt something more, something as important to me as a writer as it is as a reader. The US […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[10],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-15531","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-general"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15531","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=15531"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":15549,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/15531\/revisions\/15549"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=15531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=15531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/helenlowe.info\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=15531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}