Two years ago, I remember reporting on the premiere of the Half Blood Prince for the Stanford newspaper. Here is my favorite passage from the article:
Nearby, a group of drama students dressed in a variety of guises runs periodically to the ticket window to ask if they can watch the movie in theater 9-3/4. They talk in character and stage an epic duel between Snape, Neville Longbottom, Remus Lupin and Bellatrix Lestrange.
Amid shouts and exclamations of incredulity, they position themselves in the middle of the courtyard.
“These guys are having, like, legit duels and stuff!” is one girl’s insightful comment.
Snape points his wand at Longbottom, who shouts something incomprehensible in return.
“That’s not a spell; you just made that up!” Snape yells at Longbottom.
Shouts of “Crucio!” and “Stupefy!” arise as the wizards swish and flick their wands.
“Avada Kedavra!” screams Lestrange in a frenzy, almost plunging her wand into Lupin, and ending the duel with two dead wizards and a triumphant, if not psychotic, grin.
Just when the scene seems to have hit the peak of ridiculousness, Darth Vader shows up. A muggle pulls down his pants and runs around in circles screaming, “Harry Potter love!” as a police car casually drives by.
I love this passage because I think it clearly displays what it means to be a proud member of the Harry Potter generation. And this is a generation that exists solely because of J.K. Rowling’s excellent writing.
Take for example this famous sentence from the books: I solemnly swear that I am up to no good. Now, imagine, for a second, that we took out the word solemnly. The sentence would then be: I swear that I am up to no good. This version hardly has the same kind of charm.
To be solemn and to be up to no good is a contradiction of sorts, it displays an ironic humor—solemn people usually don’t think about being up to no good. The alliteration of the s in solemnly and the s in swear adds rhythm to the sentence, making you want to read it aloud, as is the case in general with Harry Potter books.
This is about creating magic with words, it is about adding flourishes and embellishments that change the way you tell your story. The devil is in the details. It is also the mark of a great writer, to recognize that each word not only counts, but that it can make all the difference.
Harold Bloom, a professor at Yale, wrote this in a critique of Harry Potter:
I would think in another generation or so, Harry Potter will be in the dustbins everywhere. It will be period-piece rubbish because it is so atrociously written.
Not only was he wrong about the dustbin part, but he was also wrong in his even more atrocious observation that Harry Potter was atrociously written. He is the obvious epitome of a thick-headed muggle, a Vernon Dursley type. It is his loss that he was never able to see the magic.