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.

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.

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.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bLF6sAAMb4s

All right. That’s all very well. I even agree: the test doesn’t seem to be asking for much, just that women are shown as, you know, complex human beings who interact with one another.

The problem is, it got me thinking about some of my own writing. I’m working on a novel, and at least as of page 79, I can’t say that I have two MEN talking about something other than women. And now that I’ve thought about it, this rather concerns me.

Now, a novel isn’t the same medium as a book, obviously, but I wonder if the results hold similar for novels or if they have more female presence. Also, I wonder how much this test really says about the development of the female characters. Take UP, for instance, which features one female character (Pixar must have trouble finding women to voice characters or something, since their movies overwhelmingly feature male characters, but that’s another post), but she has spunk and initiative. She’s clearly a strong female character, but she has maybe ten minutes of screen time. So is the message good or bad?

In the end, I think it’s useful to think about these things, but it’s counterproductive to give them too much weight, because it’s just one aspect.

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. We talked about how each character has a vastly different personality from the others and how they are really archetypes. The ringleader, Phil, is the reckless antihero. Zach Galifianakis’ character plays the fool, the trouble maker and comic relief. Ed Helms, or Stu, is the straight man, the conscience of the group, albeit a somewhat warped one since he’s lying to his overbearing girlfriend to go on this trip. And, finally, there’s the main character, Doug, absent for most of the film, who is the catalyst for most of the events we watch. He’s missing. His friends can’t remember why and have to find him and get him back to his bride who is waiting anxiously back home.

Maybe this wasn’t “literature” so to speak, but I could totally imagine Shakespeare writing a similar plot-driven comedy that concluded, of course, with a wedding, all of the characters safe and happy in the end (besides maybe Stu’s witch of a girlfriend who didn’t deserve to be). There wasn’t a big, deep message in this movie, right? I mean, what would we take away from this? Don’t drink whatever the weird brother-in-law-to-be is serving. Try counting cards at a Vegas casino; it’s worth it. Lie to your partner as long as you can so s/he doesn’t know you’ve totally screwed up. Vacations full of debauchery are are good idea as long as you make it home in one piece. These aren’t lessons. They’re jokes.

We aren’t supposed to learn anything from this movie. We’re supposed to be entertained. This, in my opinion, is an important lesson for young writers to learn. First, young grasshoppers, you must entertain your readers. Then, once you’ve got them within your grasp, you can do other cool stuff: teach them, make them uncomfortable, inspire them, break their hearts, etc.

I encourage my students to watch movies and good television all the time. (We’ve also talked about shows like the brand new, hour-long drama, Parenthood, as well as Big Love, Weeds, and True Blood.) Maybe this is bad. Maybe I should feel guilty about it. Molly Giles, in her visit here last week, mentioned that it seems like many of the writers she sees in her MFA program at the University of Arkansas are really good at showing what’s happening in a story but are terrible at getting inside the characters’ heads, and she blames moving pictures: TV, movies, etc. Someone else in the workshop suggested that it might be our over-reliance on the “Show, don’t tell.” mantra we’ve been worshipping since the imagists, in which case, it’s William Carlos Williams’ fault.

I’m not sure who’s to blame for students’ inability to write a contemplative scene, but it may be my fault, too. I’ve seen too many stories from beginning writers that start with a paragraph or two of exposition that spells out what we’re supposed to take from the story before it’s even started. Another common story start that I want to strangle out of my students is the one where the first two or three scenes are setting up the real story: We had been best friends for ten years…. I was driving with my friends cross country…. I loved that girl more than anything…. Ughh. Often, I want to tell them to just stop writing about love or friendship or whatever it is that seems so comfortable to them that they tell it like they’re writing instructions for how to [fill in the blank]. But I’m a firm believer that no subject is unworthy of being written about. It’s not the subject that matters, it’s the way the subject is handled, and that’s where television and movies come in. If they can’t pull us in, we won’t watch and they’re doomed. Same with short stories.

Am I a bad teacher? Am I ruining my students’ ability to write “real literature”? I don’t know, but in my defense, we read lots of literary stuff too (Raymond Carver, Charles Baxter, Wells Tower…), but even when they say that they really enjoyed one of these stories, they never get as excited as they do when I say, “Hey, have you guys seen Californication?”