This week while working on the plot of the book, I had the idea that I could actually split out the three plotlines I was including into three books. They would be: 1. The Discovery Plot of Emily adjusting to her changed life at Four Hallows and the grandmother she has never met, and being in the secret world of the wizards.
2. The journal plot revealing in the end her grandfather Aurelius incognito at the college.
3. The emerald tablet plot in which someone is either trying to kidnap Emily or trying to steal the emerald tablet.
Thoughts…
If I did this, then the first book would be even less like Harry Potter 1. It would in effect take the orphaned protagonist to the wizard’s school and show how she and her fellow neophytes struggle through their probationary year. In this plot by itself, the climax would come with the apearance of Emily’s familiar, which is the sign that a neophyte has discovered her talent and can continue at the school. Along the way, we wonder and worry about which of her friends will go on and who may be sent down, as her aunt Anne was. Emily deals with her grandmother’s stern and distant personality, and with the spy who seems to be trying to get at her for some reason. By the end of the book, in the falling action, it can be revealed to her that she is heiress to the Glass estates and most importantly the Otherworld Door in Skye.
This first book, according to my thematic outline has (as the first nine books all do) a Muse Theme and a Virtue Theme. The first book is Terpsichore and the virtue of Silence and Truth. Emily learns how to use her body and spirit in coordinated action with others, through deportment, dancing, choir, lacrosse, tennis, and cricket. The Dance is central, as a metaphor and literally. She learns of the function and uses of dance and also how it relates to the magical life. These lessons about nuvra (Brittic for prana) are foundational to magic.
Also, she is first instructed in elementary Glamoury, so learns to use her imagination actively as a magical tool — the true wand — not think of it as foolishness or idle daydreaming as she was taught at her aunt’s house. This is not merely window dressing, a background to the main action, as is that case in Harry Potter. It is integral to the Discovery plot as Emily discovers not only how magic works, but also her particular talent.
The two threats that create the dramatic tension are 1. that Emily might not pass her neophyte year, and 2. that the spy migh harm her. However, there is little or no violence n the story. The physical danger that comes at Gaping Gill does not resove into fighting much less death.
I do not want in my stories the sort of emphasis in HP on “zapping” adversaries and killing curses. The adversaries of the protagonist are not trying to kill her but find a way to possess her lands. In book 1 they are just trying to ascertain whether she is in fact the daughter of Hamish and Claire Glass. I want to focus on matters of ordinary life, particularly education.
Reading a little about the Children’s book market and the general field of Children’s lit, it seems to me true that today’s magical stories are almost always about children running from and fighting magical beings with no adult help. My desire is to write stories that show children engaging with magical beings, finding themselves to be magical beings, and receiving kind and wise guidance from adults.
Consider the adults in HP. Unlike most school story novels, the teachers are not all bad or adversarial. Usually, the teachers are at best an indifferent background to the more interesting extra-curricular antics of the characters. Children’s lives in the classroom are regarded as dull and tantamount to prison. Enid Blyton in the Malory Towers books is more positive, but the main purpose of the teachers is to be the object of practical jokes. Only the headmistress is a wise and benevolent adviser, and this in the larger dimensions of life and character. In Jill Murphy’s Worst Witch series the potions mistress is the main adversary, and the other teachers offer very little in the way of help. Mildre Hubble, the protagonist, gets herself in and out of scrapes, no thanks to the adults.
This stereotype of teachers as aloof and clueless about their students and downright uncaring about anything but their attendance and performance in academic matters is unpleasant. However true it may be in too many cases, this is not the student-teacher relationship that I want to highlight. In HP Dumbledore is a helper who withholds too much information from Harry and Harry asks too few questions. This is defective on both scores. Students should be shown eagerly asking questions and teachers, generously answering them, to expand the understand of the student.
Action and violence and shoot-em-ups with pure evil villains may sell books, but my experiment is to see if readers will like books about magic that do not depend on these massive Good against Evil struggles, but show the characters simply dealing with the kind of real-life decisions and choices, pains and joys of normal life. The presence of magic in thikind of world that is neather a silly joke, constantly tongue in cheek, nor a world of looming threat, is more appealing to me. Anne of Green Gables with magic. But, of coure, this does not even make sense to people when I suggest it because the pre-conceived notion of magic is spells and curses and magic rings and al that. There never is any attempt to understand how magic works in a natural philosophy sense.
Magic is still, almost always, set up in opposition to science and technology. Rowling makes the gesture of suggesting that magic can be studied scientifically, but strips it of its spiritual foundations. The magic of HP, despite many puns and joking references to actual magical history and folklore, diverges from both almost entirely.
I’ve taken the step of setting the story in a modified parallel future, but for the most part, I want to give the readers the real folklore and the real history of magic, and the real tools to understand the whole Art. HP’s world is split into the muggle world which is a parody of our ordinary world, with adults being largely stupid, and the wizard world where the adults and children are often stupid, corrupt, self-serving, or downright cruel. Yet, for example, do we see the actual results of Draco Malfoy’s upbringing. We see his prejudice and we see him trapped into serving evil ends through blackmail. Do we really see his character as an only child raised rich in a family of bigots who engage constantly in emotional abuse? A family that includes connections to the Black family (his mother’s side) a family full of wizards who have used magic to get what they want from other people, to dominate, control, and take.
Draco Malfoy has so much potential as an interesting character. Slytherin House has so much potential as a study in our values. But instead of doing that, the character and the house are just treated as stereotypic, half-comical, badguys. They mostly engage in cheating. The emphasis on the real core of Slytherin House — ambition — is lost.
But I am troubled by my own daughter’s incredulity that “normal life” can be combined with “magic.” She is heavily into the Sisters Grimm books now, which are tongue-in-cheek modernizations of the Grimms folktales. They are humorous and also full of action and physical threats to the girls. Compare this sort of story to some books I love: Anne of Green Gables, Little House on the Prairie, Goneaway Lake, the Nancy Drew and Tom Swift series (the latter was my favorite at age 10), or even Dr. Dolittle, the Hugh Lofting series the main “magic” of which is that the doctor can talk to animals and the animals are much more intelligent that we should normally give them credit for. I ought to re read Dragonsong about the girls harper and the fire lizards. That is magical realism and involves Menolly going to school at Harper Hall.
So, to lunch…