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?

Amen to that OP. Wonderful world, irritating writing and lead character. I hated the books as a kid and remember having fierce rows with friends over it {Not that I started the rows - they just couldn't understand someone thinking they were anything other than perfect).

Her great strength is creating an all-enveloping fictional world by splicing the conventional boarding school series with a magical world, but her prose is workmanlike at best, flaccid at worst, and HP series suffers as it goes on from far too much fan involvement.

JKR (for whom I have considerable time for her position on trans rights and their impact on women's rights) was very receptive of fan questioning of plot holes and requests for backstories, and got bogged down in interpolating these into subsequent novels. This, and a lack of stringent editing plus the (probably correct) realisation that the fans just wanted more, more, more meant the novels got over-long and sloppy.

I think she's Enid BLyton again -- prolific, successful, attuned to her fans, a brilliant conceiver of plots and vivid fictional worlds, but who writes banal prose. The main difference is that EB was considered exclusively a children's author, and no one was producing the Malory Towers series with 'adult covers', whereas the YA explosion was partly caused by HP child fans growing up along with the series.

I’m currently reading “the philosopher’s stone” to my daughter and I was actually thinking how well it was written. To say it was her first book, she’s done incredibly well with it.

I loved the Harry Potter books. They were mesmerising and I couldn’t wait to get a new one when they’d come out. I never once thought it was badly written. I thought they were excellent and I still do.

The world is wonderful and absolutely magical.

The characters are crap, two dimensional and have no growth (in fact, many regress from being strong characters to whiney, self involved prats). Harry was nothing but an arrogant arse (as was his father), Hermione was smart but that isn't a replacement for an actual personality, Ron never became his own person, Lupin became very unlikeable, Snape was a creep and Dumbledore was an arsehole. Oh and Fred Weasley was evil and Dobby utterly irritating.

Other than that, great books .

Rowling 'not being a good writer' is misogynistic trope from TRA's and snobs.

'My writer friend said she's not a good writer'

Well unless your writer friend is one of the very few writers more successful than Rowling I imagine they are the ones who are not very good.

@The80sweregreat

I often wondered if the parents get a long list of requirements for the new terms at Hogwarts and how much they charge. Harry must have been on a bursery as I can't imagine the Dursley's paying anything for poor old H!

Love to know how muggleborns find out about the school and how their parents pay for it and go about enrolling their dc in the school

@Bluesheep8

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

That’s how I felt, too.

Rowling 'not being a good writer' is misogynistic trope from TRA's and snobs.

No, I absolutely applaud her position on trans affairs, and I'm in no way a literary snob.

I have read all the Harry Potter books and thought they were great fun. I enjoyed the plot but I wouldn't say they are amongst my favourite books. I was already in my twenties when the first one was published and I wonder if they mean more to people who read them as children.

@AgeLikeWine

The first three books were great. Superb plots and appealing characters in a beautifully realised fantasy world.

The problems started with Goblet of Fire, which retained much of the appeal of the previous books but was too long winded, and the pace dropped too often.

Order of the Phoenix was much worse. It was far too long, with too much emphasis on tedious politics. The plot was muddled at best and often confusing. A good editor would have stripped out 200 pages of pointless verbiage and created a much better book.

The final two books had similar issues and I found myself skipping page after page of waffle in an attempt to relocate the actual plot. Again, the books would have been vastly improved by radical editorial pruning.

I thought the books after PoA all read like they had films in mind, rather rely on the readers imagination. The story matured but the writing didn't, as I said in my previous post, especially the characters.

I mean probably the biggest plothole is the marauders map which shows everything and everyone in the castle....yet fred and George don't wonder why a man called "Peter pettigrew" is in bed with their thirteen year old brother every night?

Also the presence of things like time Turners and veritaserum which could have been easily used to sort out all the problems that Harry faced before they even arose...you're telling me Dumbledore could get hold of a timeturner so a thirteen year old girl could take a few extra lessons but couldn't do so to go back and warn the potters about their betrayal/stop Harry and Cedric from going into the maze???

Other posters have already highlighted the good/bad elements of Jkrs writing perfectly so I won't add more...I personally love the books and her! But even if they weren't perfectly written, so what? You could be the best cordon bleu three Michelin starred chef in the world but some people would still prefer their mums cheese on toast to any caviar and oysters you put before them!

Variety is the spice of life, etc. People can take what they want out of HP and then either supplement it with different, more literary fiction if they want to, or not if they aren't really readers but just like a good story.

I think it would be a brave editor who cut the latter books. Not because I think JKR is a bolshy diva who thought she was above criticism, but because there are hundreds of thousands if not millions of readers who love the world so much that there is no limit to their appetite for it. Readers who want nothing more than to spend time in Hogwarts. I wouldn’t want to be the person who told those fans “I told her to cut the Quidditch tournament out of book 5 because it didn’t move the plot forward”.

Hermoine's parents are dentists so maybe they just got a letter from Hogwarts as H did? I assume they are both Muggles , although it's not really addressed apart from not sending her much chocolate one Easter time! They must have been aware of the other world though.

I have no time for HP as lots of the ideas were from The Worst Witch which was one of my favourite childhood books. I just felt like JK Rowling had copied

“Stephen King is similar, he has a limited style of writing - he discusses it in many of his talks.”

King’s basic writing is just okay. But his characterization and dialogue is top notch. Not many writers excel at every aspect.

I couldn't get beyond the first chapter of the first book as the writing was so awful. That said fantasy is not my scene anyway. I've tried reading the Hobbit and LOTR and couldn't get on with them either.

I wasn't terribly impressed with the films either as I felt Daniel Radcliffe was so wooden as Harry.

@Lifeisgenerallyfun Hmm! I've had a little google and found this, which agrees with your stance but positions the house elves as some kind of saints for being Christian servant types. Ick!

The other main school of thought seems to be that they're a kind of brownie for whom this is a way of life, which is why Hermione fails in her emancipation attempts and Hagrid tells her she will - because he knows magical creatures better than she does. Again, a naturally servile race of living creatures - ick!

If she was going to write about enslavement, IMO she should have had the subsequent breaking of chains, but there was none. There was some showing of respect for Dobby and Kreacher, but that just made them see HP as their 'master', giving him yet more unearned power and privilege. And Winky just hangs around the Hogwarts kitchens, forgotten until the masters need her to risk her life fighting the Death Eaters in the finale.

It all just feels badly thought-through and sidelined. It's such an important theme and it doesn't get the treatment it deserves.

I'll hop off my soapbox now

Love the concept, the imagination and the scene-setting and much of the characterisation, but fuck she needed an editor.

Her prose isn't great, but the world is. Somehow her writing creates a vivid world that people want to enter - and stay in.

You can be an extremely accomplished writer, getting everything right (plot points, structure, pacing, characterisation, actual technical writing) and yet all you end up with is words on a page.

When teaching myself how to write I spent a lot of time reading 'bad' fiction as well as 'good' and trying to get a feel for what made the difference. I learnt an unexpected amount from reading generic romance - which has a lot of really bad writing and a few excellent writers; as well as reading fanfic and analysing as I read. Sometimes you come across a technically bad story that makes you cringe, and yet there is something magical that draws you in. Conversely, you can get a 'beautifully' written story, written like it was composed by an English teacher - but it's dead.

This leads to the debate of whether good writing can be taught... You can definitely improve writing technique significantly, through learning specific tools and editing, editing, editing. But can you take someone who writes 'beautifully' but has no spark, and turn it into a blaze? Or to return to JK, can a Muggle who knows all the correct words, but has no magic, make a spell work—or can an untrained Wizard make magic?

Too many adverbs - "she said quietly, he thought vividly, he ran softly, he jumped loudly" - and some plots that went nowhere (house elves) and could have been edited, but meh, they were for youngsters. Adults complaining the language was a bit on the simple side seems an odd pastime - go read some adult books!

Rowling 'not being a good writer' is misogynistic trope from TRA's and snobs.

TRAs have undoubtedly attacked her for any reason they can find, whether fair or not; but that doesn't make all opinions of her being 'not a good writer' misogynistic. People have mentioned Stephen King, Dan Brown and John Grisham critically on here, among others - I'm sure they aren't all man-haters.

Calling criticism of a female writer's abilities misogynistic is actually almost misogynistic in itself, as if female writers somehow need to be given a pass and excuses made for any perceived lack of ability, as if they were children and 'obviously' can't be held up to the same standards as male writers.....

Also, if you ask literary editors, many will tell you they know when something is wrong in a book, and they know how to fix and polish it. But they will be the first to say they cannot write.

I wasn't terribly impressed with the films either as I felt Daniel Radcliffe was so wooden as Harry.

He is a terrible actor. Emma Watson isn't much better, she has two facial expressions in any film she's in. They're so bad in the HP films, they make our great British actors like Rickman and Smith seem hammy and wooden.

Her books are sold in their millions. How many books have these critics cold. Its like the film critics that bin a film that then goes on to make millions at the box office. Ive never read the books but found the films totally absorbing with the characters and ideas.

Her books are sold in their millions. How many books have these critics cold. Its like the film critics that bin a film that then goes on to make millions at the box office. Ive never read the books but found the films totally absorbing with the characters and ideas.

With respect, if you haven't actually read the novels, then you don't get to have a position on whether they're well or badly written.