Quote:
Originally Posted by Lemurion
While I can see your point that cutting down on the repetition in her description and increasing the vocabulary she used might have improved the Harry Potter books on one level; it would also have rendered them less suitable for their intended audience, and that wouldn't have been a good thing from JKR's perspective. Even though I'm sure some of her readership could have risen to the challenge, I'm equally sure that others either couldn't or wouldn't have risen, and those were the ones she needed to keep. It's relatively easy to sell books to people who already read a lot, not so much to those who don't. Her success came from selling books to people and families who didn't normally buy books or read much.
Writing to your audience is not a sign of lack of skill.
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I suppose one can deliberately write poorly, on the assumption that one's audience lacks the ability to read good writing, and might even be repelled by it. But I doubt that JKR was doing that. I think she hit a sweet spot in combining certain existing narratives which appeal to adolescents, to create an engaging story that readers of all ages could enjoy.
But that doesn't mean that her books are well written. It just means that she found an audience for whom how well a book is written is at best a secondary concern. And that's a pretty large audience.
When I was a boy, back in the 50s, I stumbled on a treasure trove of popular novels for boys written between 1910 and 1930, more or less. They had belonged to my uncles, and were in the attic of a barn. I had lots of good fattening high cholesterol reading for several months. Some of the names are probably still familiar - Tom Swift, the Hardy Boys, and, of course, Tarzan, for example. Others have disappeared, even in my memory - X Bar X Boys is one I do remember. Do And Dare is another. These books, in their day, were every bit as popular as Harry Potter. But like these books, the Harry Potter books will not be read a half century from now, not even by their intended audience. Read any good Horatio Alger recently? Of course not - there
is no good HOratio Alger. But in his time & place, he was Rowling.