This is so interesting! I do wonder if one day I’m going to wake up and see the HP books clearly and realise that they are poorly written, and that right now I’m so caught up in the several mysteries that I don’t see it. I never noticed the adverbs until I read about them on LJ somewhere, then they made me laugh for a while, and now I don’t notice them again. I have a feeling the adverbs go back to children’s writers like Enid Blyton, perhaps even specifically to her school stories, the Malory Towers books, which are definitely an influence on HP. I’m sure the girls in those books did and said things adverbly.
Are movies really so dominant in our culture that novels mimic them? “Think like a movie maker” would be terrible advice to give to a writer of novels, though it might be a fun thing for a writer to do once in a while. A novel is an exploration through words alone, and any meanings, allusions and any images a novel evokes are evoked by words. Movies evoke meaning etc through movement and light, essentially. A screenplay is no more a movie than it is a novel. I wonder do we actually see books as movies in our heads? I don’t think I do. I don’t usually have a completely clear picture of what the characters and settings in a book look like, I don’t have a sort of photographic image. Instead I have a feeling about it, an impression of connections between the characters and between them and the place they’re in. Rather than a movie I think I might see something more like a cubist painting, or a collage. Perhaps I’m just not trying hard enough! But aren’t we actually more likely to relate a novel we’re reading to our own lives, which are not purely visual and not something two-dimensional that we sit and watch but are multi-dimensional and going on around us and inside us? I often accuse myself of reading only to find out what happens in the end, but detective novels - which it could be argued are mostly about the end – I find unsatisfying precisely for the shorthand world view they tend to present. Dickens one reads for the jaw-dropping incredible, insane world he describes even more than for the plot. And I’ve just remembered the aweome spontaneous combustion bit in ‘Bleak House’ which is largely about smell and a heaviness in the air which is not the easiest thing for film to evoke.
Some of the scenes JKR writes are very visual – it seems she really wants you to picture them to understand what she’s getting at, except that the meaning of the visual imagery in them isn’t necessarily clear. Hermione surrounded by birds and Draco and Harry in the water and blood in the bathroom are cases in point. I’m not sure if its because she’s seeing a movie in her head or if it’s something to do with alchemy. Some of the time when she doesn't describe as much as might be required it seems to be precisely in order to promote uncertainty, and to get us to think about it. Unless it really is just lazy writing ...
Ut pictura poesis, sort of
Are movies really so dominant in our culture that novels mimic them? “Think like a movie maker” would be terrible advice to give to a writer of novels, though it might be a fun thing for a writer to do once in a while. A novel is an exploration through words alone, and any meanings, allusions and any images a novel evokes are evoked by words. Movies evoke meaning etc through movement and light, essentially. A screenplay is no more a movie than it is a novel. I wonder do we actually see books as movies in our heads? I don’t think I do. I don’t usually have a completely clear picture of what the characters and settings in a book look like, I don’t have a sort of photographic image. Instead I have a feeling about it, an impression of connections between the characters and between them and the place they’re in. Rather than a movie I think I might see something more like a cubist painting, or a collage. Perhaps I’m just not trying hard enough! But aren’t we actually more likely to relate a novel we’re reading to our own lives, which are not purely visual and not something two-dimensional that we sit and watch but are multi-dimensional and going on around us and inside us? I often accuse myself of reading only to find out what happens in the end, but detective novels - which it could be argued are mostly about the end – I find unsatisfying precisely for the shorthand world view they tend to present. Dickens one reads for the jaw-dropping incredible, insane world he describes even more than for the plot. And I’ve just remembered the aweome spontaneous combustion bit in ‘Bleak House’ which is largely about smell and a heaviness in the air which is not the easiest thing for film to evoke.
Some of the scenes JKR writes are very visual – it seems she really wants you to picture them to understand what she’s getting at, except that the meaning of the visual imagery in them isn’t necessarily clear. Hermione surrounded by birds and Draco and Harry in the water and blood in the bathroom are cases in point. I’m not sure if its because she’s seeing a movie in her head or if it’s something to do with alchemy. Some of the time when she doesn't describe as much as might be required it seems to be precisely in order to promote uncertainty, and to get us to think about it. Unless it really is just lazy writing ...