Harry Potter was badly written

[Stackys]

I’ve seen this said on here a few times, that the books are badly written and she’s a terrible author who just got lucky.

Why do people say this? The world she created was amazing, what’s wrong with the books?

Wait. How does the voting work on this? I want to say they are well-written. Is that YABU or YANBU?

Authors who connect with that many readers don't get "lucky". This type of tripe is usually said by failed writers circle types who can emulate Joyce, Dostoevsky etc but can't work out why their plots and ideas have no purchase in the market.

Rowling created an entire universe, one plenty of folk love to get lost in. She created characters people care about, are invested in, want them to get what they want in that universe. This is good writing in my view.

And I'm not even a Potter fan really. I just don't like literary snobbishness.

Sorry I didn’t mean to put voting on!

Ok ... AIBU to think that HP books were WELL written? ☺️

It's the actual English, rather than the world she created.
The storytelling is brilliant. The characters, by and large, well thought out and developed. There are a few plot question marks, where it seems clear she didn't know herself where are was going.
But the English at times is mediocre.

No, I couldn't have done better. I'm not an author. But I do teach writing and I often use specific HP paragraphs as texts to be improved.

I’ve got a friend who is a writer who says J k Rowling is a terrible writer.

It seems to come from other writers and perhaps those who really know the trade.

Myself I am not clever enough to know if her writing is good or not. I just know that her books allow children to escape into another world.
Maybe that escapism and this magical world just caught the public imagination at the right time (and she got lucky) but I don’t know.

I love the books and always will.

I also like more “grown up” adult books as well. I like reading and find it an escape.

There’s a few plot holes I gather in the Harry Potter books but not important enough to worry about,

The storyline is fantastic.
The books need better editing. Goblet off Fire especially is too long.

What plot holes?

As @ScorpioSphinxInACalicoDress says...English teachers will also be able to pick up where the writing isn’t good.

There's one I use in particular- the name Harry appears 12 times in 5 lines, not a pronoun in sight. He's moving, so it's Harry walked quickly, Harry ran silently, Harry waited anxiously. Etc etc.

I could never get far enough into them to judge because I found the story and characters too boring.

@ScorpioSphinxInACalicoDress

It's the actual English, rather than the world she created. The storytelling is brilliant. The characters, by and large, well thought out and developed. There are a few plot question marks, where it seems clear she didn't know herself where are was going. But the English at times is mediocre.

No, I couldn't have done better. I'm not an author. But I do teach writing and I often use specific HP paragraphs as texts to be improved.

To me though this is just a great example of my maxim that plot, and well drawn characters, will always triumph over well-formed English, as long as the English doesn't get in the way of understanding or enjoyment.

There are plenty of books I've read where the author won't be troubling the Bookers any time soon, but the plot, the pacing, the characters, the scenarios, are such that it's impossible to put down, and there's a real sense of scale and universe throughout.

"Improving" Harry Potter is an interesting thought - would it connect better with audiences once improved? Perhaps, perhaps not.

I voted YABU for the click bait title.

I've only read one. Lots of things were just copied from a book I read and loved as a child - The Worst Witch. I couldn't get past that I'm afraid

Then surely it's the editing rather than the actual writing!

I’m not the target audience, but I have read them all. They’re a bit of easy escapism, but no, I don’t think they’re terribly well written, and she’s got a tin ear for dialogue. Good luck to her, though, she’s popular for a reason.

I read one of the Robert Galbraith/Cormoran Strike (sp?) novels, and thought that was pretty poor. It moved along quite briskly, but I really struggled to distinguish between the three major suspects. I wouldn’t read another, but I would watch a tv adaptation.

They are wonderful, imaginative stories that have now inspired two generations of children.
There will always be some people who pick holes in things.

@Stackys

What plot holes?

There’s several..and lots of arguments about them.

Veritaserum for example is able to get the absolute truth from people. Yet you have all these Death Eaters walking around saying they were under the Imperius Curse...and nobody thought “hang on, let’s just grab some of this Veritaserum to see if they are telling the truth”. 😁
.

She successfully conveyed to millions of readers what she intended. Her books are enjoyed by her readers. If she were a bad writer, she wouldn't have been able to do that.

She may not be a literary giant, but she's a good story teller and she used writing as her medium to great effect.

Few people could do as well.

I attempted to read the first one when it first became a hit as I must have been about 19. I couldn’t finish it. I found the writing style
Clunky and dull. The don’t honk she has just ‘got lucky’ though. Children care more about plot and characters than they do about sentence structure! I still don’t get why so many adults love the books though.

Fabulous, gripping stories. Crap grammar, style, whatever. Can I do better and make myself gloriously wealthy? No. So, good on JKR, my hero in many ways.

I clicked the wrong button 😫

I agree the world of HP is quite good, and the idea is good.

The writing is really bad though (with the odd rather mawkish ‘inspo’ quote from Dumbledore), and the last few books in the series really irritate me because they just seem like they’re trying to milk that cash cow for all it’s worth - they don’t need to be as long, or as many of them as there are! There’s also a million randomly introduced characters at that point which don’t really add that much to the story?

One massive plot hole is that they spend all academic year fighting Voldie, it reaches a crescendo in July, and then they all go home for the summer holidays. EVERY SINGLE BOOK (apart from maybe the last two? Been a while since I read them). Why does fighting the evil in the wizarding world fit neatly into the school calendar?

Why do all the slytherins fuck off when they have that big battle, but we are led to believe there’s good and bad in every house, and snape is a goodie in the end?

Sorry, but it’s not well written at all. The other books JK wrote under her pseudonym were even worse though.

I’ve seen this said on here a few times, that the books are badly written and she’s a terrible author who just got lucky.

Why do people say this? The world she created was amazing, what’s wrong with the books?

You’re conflating plotting/narrative and prose formulation. They’re not the same thing.

At the level of world-building and story arc, I think the series is fabulous. However, at a sentence level, the writing is sometimes ‘clunky’ and inelegant (as in the example given earlier).

A book can be simultaneously poorly written yet excellently plotted, and vice versa.

‘To me though this is just a great example of my maxim that plot, and well drawn characters, will always triumph over well-formed English, as long as the English doesn't get in the way of understanding or enjoyment.’

This!
Re the plot holes, the scale of the whole series is so vast and ambitious it’s not entirely surprising if there are some, and given the number of people who have read them obsessively for years it’s also not surprising if she hasn’t got away with them as many less successful writers do simply because nobody reads them enough to notice!
If someone told me she was a terrible writer I would think they had very different ideas from me how bad something had to be to count as terrible.