In response to Rowling’s anodine New Year’s advice to writers in the form of ‘Answers to FAQs’ on her website, a nasty bloke or madame asked her two more questions, namely, ‘Why is your writing so shit?’ and ‘How are you so politically delusional?’ She chose to respond to the troll under the internet bridge.

She explained that her ‘writing is so shit’ because, well, “I do the best I can with the talent I’ve got, but I know my writing isn’t to everyone’s taste.” Her millions of followers, of course, rushed in the thread to reassure her that her writing is very good indeed. I’m not sure you take this as authentic humility, fishing for praise, or some combination of insecurity and rising above the nastiness. Your call.

In answer to the question of how she arrived at her “political delusions,” though, I think we see a remarkable shift in her tweeting posture, if it is a sincere response and not a one-off dismissal to a troll. She wrote that “my politics probably spring from my life experience and my temperament, like everyone else’s.” Which is to say, as ardent as the opinions she shares in her tweets and re-tweets about Brexit, Trump, and illegal immigration on the American border can be, that she recognizes they are only opinions rather than demonstrated truths that no thinking or kind or honest person can deny or disagree with. The opinions she has are only some mixture of temperament and experience.

She added a third answer, this time to a question “unwritten but implied” by the nastygram tweeter. “Try being less of an asshole.” Rowling’s admirers and detractors on the comment thread seem to have played the Jeopardy game of finding the question from the pithy answer and come up with either “What is my best advice for you, Gentle Reader?” or “What is my New Year’s Resolution for 2019?”

I’m hopeful that it is the latter and that Rowling will simultaneously continue to embed her political views in her work, more or less balanced in despising radical left and right if Lethal White is any measure, and back-off the vulgarity and condescending dismissals of those with whom she disagrees via Twitter. This post when combined with her sixteen point KJV thread and prophecy of late last year may mark a turning point of sorts in Rowling’s political savvy and maturity. Not the end of the nonsence, obviously (and I know she implies via re-tweet that all yellow vests protestors are Nazis…) but a sign of the beginning of the end?

I suspect you must disagree, especially if like many of her neo-Marxist followers, you fist pump every time Rowling laughs at or derides the bad guys. I hope you will take Rowling’s third answer to heart in 2019, as will I.

Rowling has made two New Year’s additions to JKRowling.com, both answers to FAQs about writing. You can read them here and here. They’re worth the time it takes to read them.

In a nutshell, Rowling’s advice to wannabe writers is “keep at it” and “ignore those scam artists who want to sell you magic beans in the shape of ‘writing rules’ that successful story tellers all follow.”

This is simultaneously encouraging and, well, bullocks.

Rowling is doing a good job as “Most Successful Author of the Millenium” in saying the encouraging words that those who dream of repeating her Cinderella story long to hear. Here’s hoping there is a writer out there of Rowling’s quality who reads these words inspiring courage and carries on to finish that manuscript (or to make the fourth revision that makes the story magical — and appealing to a publisher or literary agent).

But that there are no rules for writers beyond persistence and reading widely? C’mon. I get the idea that she is discouraging wannabes from being taken in by online programs that claim they have the secret sauce that will help the talented and the deluded to ‘Write Like Rowling.’ But the suggestion she makes is that her rules for writing, ones we know well that she follows, either do not exist or are not repeatable.

As in planning a slow narrative release over several stories, the Rowling signature. Or ring composition story scaffolding, the template of human stories from time immemorial that Rowling uses in all her novels and screenplays. Or literary alchemy, a symbol set used by Rowling, Meyer, and Collins in the best selling series of our times and one which strectches back to Shakespeare and Chaucer and winds its way through many of the English ‘Greats.’

Those are rules that writers can learn and which will improve their writing. The least Rowling could have said, I think, is what she has said continuously since 1997, that her success as a writer is due mainly to her planning, what close reading of her works suggests most would call “obsessive planning.”

We can all agree that there is no magic formula to great writing or, if there are, then without creative genius and the writing skills to bring them to life, they are worthless. But there are rules for great story telling — or guidelines and parameters or models if the R-word makes you flinch. Wannabe writers who think they are going to be great or just ‘writing like Rowling’ without getting into the tool bag she has built up and learning the rules she follows are as misled by the ‘No Rules’ delusion as they might be by magic beans salesman.

Now that I have that off my chest, let’s get back to the important work of trying to read the notes under that peacock paper-weight that headed both of the JKRowling.com posts. It looks like stray thoughts on Fantastic Beasts to me. You?

Today is the 21st of December on the Orthodox Church Calendar or 12/21 in the US and 21/12 in the UK. Besides meaning that there are only four more days until Orthodox Nativity and the Twelve Days of Christmas, it also marks what I hope will hereafter be celebrated as International Chiasmus Day.

I think this day of all days is best for commemoration of self-echoing phrases, verses, passages, books, and series of books both because it is the only calendar date that has digits repeating the other in reverse order (I say “Fie!” to those offering up March 30th as 03/30…) and because it is the date by which Phileas Fogg had to complete his 80 days circumnavigation of the globe in Verne’s chiastic Around the World in Eighty Days.

Yes, I believe Verne chose this date to highlight the ring structure of the work in question; my 2013 post on the subject details how Fogg’s journey is an exact mirror reflection in forward and then reverse order, the return trip beginning with his sailing from Japan, complete with hilarious inverse parallels in the adventures Fogg, Passepartout, and Aouda have in India and America.

I have moved the date from Fogg’s calendar to the traditional Christian one because the Church calendar includes both solar and lunar components and there was a lot of kerfuffle about 12/21 in 2012. Too many people think “Mayan Apocalypse!’ when they see that date in December so I thought a move to Gregorian January might help. Not to mention the date slipped by me.

How to celebrate International Chiasmus Day? Sadly, Worlds of Fun, an American Theme Park dedicated to Vernes’ Around the World in Eighty Days (I kid you not) is closed until the Spring. And though you can fly around the world on commercial flights, believe it or not, in eighty hours, that is still a might long for Chiasmus Day as a single day. And trying to do it in eighty minutes? You’d have to break into Cape Caneveral or Bill Gates’ 401k to do that.

I think the best way to celebrate the day is to pick up a favorite book by an author that is known to have structural concerns and read that book chiastically, a ring-reading. This involves reading the first chapter, then the last, then the second chapter and the next to last, and so on until you reach the middle. Did you discover hidden correspondences? Is the ‘meaning in the middle’?

I’ll testify that this a lot of fun, especially with Rowling’s books and screenplays (and Galbraith’s!). Tomorrow I’ll share my notes on Crimes of Grindelwald when read as a ring composition. I look forward to reading your findings on Crimes or your favorite book. Until then, find a Palindrome Pal and get reading!

 

 

 

 

Step One: Go to the library.

I suspect this is true of all other great writers. Somehow I doubt all or even many of them wrote in and turned down pages corners in borrowed books as Stoker seems to have done, but, whatever.

Hug a librarian today in gratitude for all the novels whose genesis is in the stories their authors found on library shelves. (H/T to @BeatriceGroves1)

A Happy New Year of Reading — and Talking about Reading Your Favorite Books at HogwartsProfessor!

J. K. Rowling with 14.6 million followers has the largest twitter following of any author on planet Earth. She has been using her bully pulpit there, not only to occasionally bully those followers who dare disagree with her and to dismiss in as patronizing a fashion as she can muster the master bully, the President of the United States, but also to push (on a daily, frantic, even frenetic basis) the cause of a ‘People’s Vote,’ that is, a second go at the Brexit referendum. Rowling is a passionate ‘Remainer’ and, except for Lumos notes here and there now that the tidal wave of Fantastic Beasts publicity is done, her twittering is all about the idiocy of Brexit and the inevitable apocalypse that will result if the first referendum results are respected as final.

As near hysterical as much of this or just the weight of the number of re-tweets is, Rowling has chosen this time, of all times, to break with the political party of her youth and maturity, the leftist Labour Party now headed by Jeremy Corbyn. Part of this, of course, must be that Corbyn refuses to support a second referendum on Brexit. Rowling’s given reason, however, has made her a lightning rod for criticism from the UK’s political left. She says that she can longer vote Labour because of Corbyn’s anti-Semitism and the defense of same by his supporters. Prejudice against Jews for Rowling is a professed red-line that not even political reds, the leftists of her progressive stripe, can cross without losing her allegiance (and one assumes, generous financial support; Rowling has been known to gift Labour up to a million pounds sterling at one go).

On 22 December 2018 Rowling posted a 16 part twitter feed in something approaching King James English syntax and spelling in which she tells the story of her tribulations as a prophet to the tribe of Labour about how they have forsaken the right path and can expect a divine wrath of sorts. It is simultaneously comic, seering, and self-satirizing in a way that is re-assuring, at least to this serious reader of Rowling, that she hasn’t completely lost her mind or sense of humor about political disagreements.

After the jump, I publish the sixteen tweets, furnish a few necessary annotations Brit friends have sent me for references this Yank couldn’t grock (thank you, Elspeth!), and then explain the importance of the tweet beyond the Brexit kerfuffle for Rowling-ologists.

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