If you study the plotting of the books, if you pay attention to the themes and ideas Rowling tries to convey, you'll see that Snape can't possibly be a bad guy. But even knowing this, the reveal was surprising.

There are spoilers in this post, but if you haven’t read Harry Potter by now, well—what’s wrong with you?

We’re less than three weeks away from the final installment of the Harry Potter movies: Deathly Hallows Part II hits theaters at midnight on July 15. I’ve already got my tickets for the midnight double header (Parts I and II), and I’ve gotten over my sadness that the Lansing-area does not have an all-day marathon like Grand Rapids, does (yes, I would have gotten up at 4:30 a.m. to watch all eight movies, I know that makes me a bit of a fangirl).

I started reading Harry Potter at about fifteen. My sister had the first two books, and I made fun of her for reading kid literature (never mind that she was a kid). My dad read books one and two to my sister, but since she was in the room next door, I eventually started listening in. Then, when the third book came out (we only had one copy of each book, at that point) I read it straight through one night because I knew I had to give it back to my sister in the morning. Book four we read aloud as a family then listened to on audio book in the car on the way to one of my soccer tournaments (24 hours in a car is not enough to listen to Goblet of Fire, by the way). The fifth book came out during a family reunion in Alabama, and there were no bookstores in a 50-mile radius. I waited in line at Walmart at 6:30 a.m. then promptly ignored my relatives for the remainder of the trip. (As a funny aside, this place was so hick that Walmart had only stocked a few copies, and the employees were surprised that they were over halfway sold out ten minutes after they opened. My family bought four copies. We don’t like to share.) The sixth book I bought at midnight the day before work selling Sunglasses, a day, I admit, that I wasn’t all that on the ball, because I’d been up until almost 7 a.m., repeatedly telling myself, “just one more chapter.” The seventh book I read over three days, because I didn’t want to admit it was all over.

My generation, my sister’s generation—we’re in an interesting spot. We grew up with the madness (even if some of us were just a touch older). It was the book that started midnight release events for books rather than relegating them to just movies. It was the book that got an entire generation to read, to love reading. But these are the things we all know about Harry Potter. These are the things in every news story.

Ever since I stayed up all night reading Prisoner of Azkaban ten-plus years ago, I’ve been waiting for the next piece to come. First it was the books, then the movies. And now even those are ending. I’ve always liked the suspense of waiting, of wondering what’s going to happen. This has become especially true since I started writing. The more I learned about stories, about plot and characters, about language, the more I was able to analyze the books, to critique, or guess what was coming next. I was too young, too inexperienced, when the fifth book came out to understand that Sirius needed to die, to get that heroes need to lose their mentors to be able to stand on their own. I don’t remember how I felt about Dumbledore’s death the next book, but that very fact makes me sure that it came as less of a surprise. By the time the seventh book came out, I had seen that big character twist coming. Snape, I’d argued for two years, had to be good. All evidence aside, the structure of Rowling’s world, the messages she was trying to convey, meant that he couldn’t possibly be bad. Otherwise the world really was black and white. (Also, I knew a Weasley had to go, by sheer odds).

I won’t argue that Harry Potter is some great work of literature on the language level. It was never supposed to be. Her writing does seem to reflect the fact that the books moved beyond children’s literature in the later books, but there is just as much of an argument that she simply got better through practice as there is that she upped her game for her adult audience (more, even, in my opinion). Yeah, some things are annoying (for instance, Rowling loves for Hermione to say things “waspishly,” usually to Ron, and if you can’t hear that tone in her voice without the adjective, you haven’t been paying attention). But there are other things she does well, even if they are heavy handed, if compared to adult literature. The scene in the seventh book where Ron walks out on Harry and Hermione is especially well done (so much so, in fact, that the movie version of it felt very flat to me), and it was the first time that I really noticed, as a writer, that you can accomplish a lot of things by having the characters’ surroundings reflect the mood you’re going for. (Also, the plotting is nothing short of astounding. I have nothing but respect for people who put together series where each book builds on the previous; I can hardly hold the form of a story in the palm of my hands.)

I’ve always been a firm believer that you can learn from any type of writing, good or bad, genre or literature (though this distinction makes me uncomfortable), for children or adults. Harry Potter has confirmed this to me. Whether you love or hate the books (or don’t really care), you can’t deny that there is something magical in the stories (pun totally intended). Anything that inspires such a multitude of readers deserves to be studied for that fact, if nothing else. (As an aside, I hate to make that argument, because it means that I will probably end up reading Twilight someday, no matter how that hurts me inside. But it’s still true.)

Is anyone else a Potter fan? Is anyone else doing anything special in preparation for the final movie? If, like me, you feel both excited and sad about the end, just remember, there’s still more coming.

The main character for The Hunger Games has been cast. Jennifer Lawrence will play Katniss Everdeen in the trilogy, the first film of which is set to be released next year. The speculation over who will play which character has been ongoing for some time now, but now that the casting has officially begun, it’s in full flow. I’ve got some mild opinions myself, but I’m trying to reserve them until I actually see the movie because, hey, I’m not a casting director.

But it’s hard to see a beloved book turn into a movie. Exciting too, of course (though I know some people who disagree with that assessment), but there’s always risk involved. I can no longer remember, for example, how I first pictured Frodo, or Harry Potter, or Lyra Belacqua, or Elizabeth Bennett, or Briony Tallis. Now, when I read those books, I see the actors instead of the portrait the author painted for. Of course, we like to see casting directors that use this vision in the casting, producers and directors that make it come alive once the cameras roll, but I think we all know that this doesn’t always (usually?) happen.

And then there’s the way the plot is shaped, tweaked, to make it fit the different medium. I’m not one of those people that stresses over every detail that is changed—I understand that putting a book on the screen verbatim would make for a boring production—but over time I sometimes find myself unable to remember exactly which things were brought in from the book and which were brought in for the film. (This actually happened earlier tonight, when my sister made a comment about a different piece of work, and I had to remind her that the book actually contradicted her statement exactly.)

I’m excited to see this book on the big screen, I really am. But I’m nervous too. I know, though, that no matter what I’ll see it, and most likely buy it when it comes out. But until then, I’ve got over a year of waiting, and wondering.

I’d considered doing another post about LOST today, in honor of the series finale, which I just finished watching. I wanted to talk about how, in the end, the show came back to character and how despite the sci-fi elements, I’m inclined to call it literary. But then I made the mistake of going online to see how other fans had reacted, and I saw a lot of hatred—hatred that I saw mainly stemming from (what I consider to be) a lack of understanding, and I decided I wanted some time to digest the show on my own, without having to explain why the first 120 episodes, each individually, meant more than the finale, but why the finale was still absolutely essential to the closure, and the shape of the show. You’re just going to have to trust me on this, or keep watching over and over until you get it.

Instead, I’m going to talk about the Bechdel Test for Women in Movies, which actually kind of relates, because the criticism that most infuriated me tonight was one where a blogger clearly dissected the entire show to fit an idea she wanted to have about it—that it’s a sexist, racist piece of crap with “plot holes the size of {her} Hyundai,” poor writing, bad dialogue, and the list goes on and on. (I guess the millions of fans are just all stupid, but then again, I can think of some stories I would say similar things about, so maybe I’m just being elitist here.)

Anyway, back to this test. I swear I can stay focused. And that this really isn’t a post about Lost. Not entirely anyway.

This test was created a while back to evaluate gender equality in movies. Take a look below the cut here.

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Find exemplars wherever you can.

Last week while talking to my creative writing class about various structures they might try fitting their fiction into I found myself suddenly using the movie The Hangover as an example of a classic story form. My students, all of whom save two had seen the movie, were excited to talk about something they actually liked and engaged in willingly outside of class. “Oh yeah, that movie was so funny!” they exclaimed while I tried to backtrack a little in order to make sure they understood that we were still having a constructive, academic conversation. We’d talked a bit about journey stories already, and several students had attempted writing road trip stories, knowing from reading our textbook that it’s usually a bad idea to write a scene that places one character alone in a car unless they are thinking about something active outside of the car, a flashback maybe, since a one-person scene tends to lack energy or conflict, two things that stories thrive on. So I ask them, “Why do you think the writers chose to place four men together in this car? Why not two?” One student said that if there were only two guys the story couldn’t have existed because one of the guys has to go missing for the plot to go on. “Okay, good point, but why four? What is each character doing in this movie? How does each one play an important role in propelling the plot?” That’s when the conversation improved. Read more »