Dear Ms. Rowling,
I wanted to start by thanking you for what was truly a great
contribution to my childhood! Your novels kept me reading at a time when books
were losing much of their lustre and appeal; when video games and television
were starting to creep in a bit more. I feel as though I know Harry and
Dumbledore and Hagrid, and all the denizens of Potterearth, just as I feel I
know the other characters from the great literature I’ve had the privilege to
read.
My own interests in school were limited to three things: Geography,
English literature, and Religious studies. I love books, and want to write my
own. Geography is really just a favourite past-time for me, remembering all of
the brilliant facts and processes of the world we live on, as well as more
about our societies and countries. Religious studies, theology, or philosophy I
suppose, is a point of major inquiry for me – something that I find mentally
intensive and challenging, because it just absorbs so much from all things
around it. It feels like mind-boggling thinking, deep historical and methodical
reading, and leaves many puzzles to the imagination and daily experience of
life. I feel that, given the added literary and imaginative pleasure of your
books during my youth, I am able to pursue these interests to a full extent,
and so want to write myself (when more fully ready and experienced, I only do
little poems and random short stories presently).
I find the way you write must be as creatively, materially
intensive as what I’d like to write myself. Crafting a universe in the
imagination is such a joy, but is alas polluted terribly by growing older. We
get better at expressing the things we imagine on paper, but due to the
experience of life, lose more of the descriptive clarity of pure imagination,
and begin to bring in the clutter of the real world. We suddenly feel the need
to set up a political system or banking sector or belligerent eastern nations,
meticulously explained to fit around the fictitious universe we’ve come up
with, to fit the needs of the societies they serve. It’s pretty cool for adults,
but terribly dull for children. I feel as though, if I were young and reading
my own stuff for the first time, I’d get bored or hate it… Authors like yourself
seem to really hit the mark when you subtly get on with it and don’t make a big
deal of it. You use a figure, say, that relates to every school child in the UK
as ‘the authority’ or trustworthy figure, such as a school headmaster. Indeed,
you can make an anti-hero from a school chemistry teacher (of sorts) to be ‘that
one that hates me in school.’ It makes sense, I guess, if I pretend I’m a child
again. Dumbledore and Snape were, in a sense, fantastically written characters,
for which I tip my cap to you. So I make the first request of this letter: do
you have any advice for an aspiring author, like me, on how to find great
characters, and write them equally well?
Continuing from my last point, your world-craft technique
completely enveloped me as a child, and still does. I am possessed of a rare
gift, as a young but fully grown man: a lot of childhood disbelief. I know
quite a lot through my education and lively youth, have travelled a little and
met a lot of people, yet still I am mind-blown on at least a daily basis. My
reactions and emotions, particularly amazement or humour, are downright
juvenile, and most things tickle me pink. I love seeing couples kissing, I can’t
stop myself from standing amazed at a clear night sky, I wish everything was a
soft warm material like a whole world of blankets, and I can’t forgive a person
who doesn’t love Monet (even if it’s just a framed poster in a middle class
living room). I’ve found that I love pure things, but have such a wide
tolerance and contentment that I can find purity in most things. So, where I
find a very pure, untainted thing, I really feel a need to protect or nurture
it. I genuinely cared for Harry et al. and their plight. I felt a lot of pity
for the ever misunderstood Snape (even though I despised his means). And yet,
in my adulthood, I’ve come to notice something about my fond memories of
growing up a Potter fan. Predominantly, that I enjoyed it the very most when it
was merely a book I overheard someone talking about in class, a book that my
mum brought home because she’d heard the kids talking about it at school. And the
both of us retreating to our rooms to read it, and then meeting up after to
talk about it in the kitchen. Sharing one of the most captivating story we’d
heard up until then (or at least, could read at that stage). You introduced me
to my very most favourite and over-used word, ‘surreptitiously.’ Your
characters introduced morality and virtue into my life more than the Bible,
which I mostly laugh through. I say laugh through in the context that I find
the prose and storylines in it extremely captivating, and am a student of
ancient literature. I don’t take others’ beliefs to be a joke, but sadly have
yet to be convinced of Christianity or any religions I’ve met (maybe
Zoroastrianism, as it has a cool premise). Any way, I’m digressing and wasting
the precious time I have with a hero of mine’s attention!
The question I’d like to ask regarding the previous
paragraph is this. My fondest memory of Harry Potter was not through any of the
media around it, other than the books. The toys, films, t-shirts, the cult of
personality around the actors, and millions in profits (and certainly not the
comfortable, private lifestyle you and your family so rightly deserve,
press-free), and other such things. The words on paper were the magic, but I
have a hard time convincing anyone who has seen the movies of that… It’s a shot
in the foot, in my view, though I really don’t begrudge you any success or
comfort from it. In fact, I strongly advocate that you live a regular life and
enjoy your achievement, that you might then get the inspiration to write even
more, and new books too! I just ask that, if I aim to avoid much of the clutter
to my writing enterprise, what is the best way to avoid it but still be a great
writer?
So, now I say once again, thank you very much for your kind
and brilliant books, Ms. Rowling. Thank you for keeping the desire to read and
write alive in me, right to this day! Thank you to all the brilliant authors
like you, and throughout history, who give us this great exercise in wonderment
and joy, and in whose spirit you work. Free from the disdain of beauty from the
natural sciences, and the tedium of mathematical explanation. Free from the
clutter of politics, hatred and discrimination of everyday life. Free from the ‘realism’
of video games and television and biographies. Free from the economics of art,
for the sake of the arts themselves. That is what I want to thank you for – for
another exquisite record of the0 imagination, for all time and to the
betterment of humanity in memoriam.
Your humble fan,
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