This Explains A Lot To Me
From today's Writer's Almanac by Garrison Keillor, honoring J.K. Rowling on her birthday, comes this passage concerning Rowling's tastes in literature:
J.K. Rowling has launched a new generation of readers (and some adult readers) into the world of fantasy, but it's a genre that she doesn't actually like much herself. She didn't even realize that she was writing fantasy until after her first book was published. She says, "You know, the unicorns were in there. There was the castle, God knows. But I really had not thought that that's what I was doing. And I think maybe the reason that it didn't occur to me is that I'm not a huge fan of fantasy." She has never managed to finish the Lord of the Rings series or the Narnia series, and her favorite authors are realists: Jane Austen, whom she calls "the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire," and contemporary Irish novelist Roddy Doyle.
This to my mind is a big reason why she's had such success. If you think like a genre writer, you write like a genre writer, and it's a very limiting thing. It's one reason why I like crossover fics so much: I like to see favorite characters from different books and genres interacting (imagine, for instance, how young Lily and young Sev might have turned out if they'd fallen through a hole in the universe and wound up in the Ramtops at Mistress Weatherwax's front door?).
J.K. Rowling has launched a new generation of readers (and some adult readers) into the world of fantasy, but it's a genre that she doesn't actually like much herself. She didn't even realize that she was writing fantasy until after her first book was published. She says, "You know, the unicorns were in there. There was the castle, God knows. But I really had not thought that that's what I was doing. And I think maybe the reason that it didn't occur to me is that I'm not a huge fan of fantasy." She has never managed to finish the Lord of the Rings series or the Narnia series, and her favorite authors are realists: Jane Austen, whom she calls "the pinnacle to which all other authors aspire," and contemporary Irish novelist Roddy Doyle.
This to my mind is a big reason why she's had such success. If you think like a genre writer, you write like a genre writer, and it's a very limiting thing. It's one reason why I like crossover fics so much: I like to see favorite characters from different books and genres interacting (imagine, for instance, how young Lily and young Sev might have turned out if they'd fallen through a hole in the universe and wound up in the Ramtops at Mistress Weatherwax's front door?).