I want to try tonight to explain as succinctly — and as provocatively — as possible why I think Rowling’s ‘Lake and Shed’ metaphorical explanation of how she writes offers a compelling reason for both why she writes and why readers around the world love her novels the way they do. I call this her ‘G-Spot’ and ‘Triple Play’ because it is her point of singular genius, the defining quality that separates her from contemporary story-tellers, which involves ‘Shed’ artistry of three particular literary tools, all subliminal, which work together to achieve her aims.
First, then, a brief review of Rowling’s ‘Lake and Shed’ description of how she writes, her method, inspiration to publication, then my hypothesis of why this method reflects why she writes, and finally, a very brief discussion of Rowling’s three ‘Shed’ power-tools that all have a shared aim and effect on readers. All after the jump!
The Lake and the Shed
If you are unfamiliar with Rowling’s ‘Lake and Shed’ metaphor of how she writes, please read The Lake and The Shed: Rowling Reveals Her Writing Process and listen to the ‘Rowling Studies’ podcast about the author’s 2024 ‘On Writing.’ And Rowling Reveals Mental Image of What Lives in Her Lake of Inspiration is helpful, too, I think, at least with respect to the G-Spot and Triple Play ideas below.
In brief, Rowling shared on a 2019 BBC4 Christmas program how she understands how she writes.
Well, I’ve never said this before because I always think it sounds so bonkers, and, although it’s something I think about a lot, I’ve always been a bit wary about articulating it to anyone else.
But I envisage my process thus: I feel as though I go through a lot of trees which are my day to day concerns, what we all deal with all the time, and those I see as trees inside my head and then I get to a place which is my work place where there is a lake and there’s a shed. And this is my process.
I feel as though the inspiration is the thing that lives in the lake that’s very mysterious, that I never see. But it hands me stuff. And then I have to take this unformed stuff – sometimes it can be reasonably formed, sometimes it’s very blobby like molten glass or something, and then I have to take it into the shed and there I have to work on it.
And because I’ve had this metaphor in my head for many many years, when I read something that I’ve written I have a sort of shorthand that I say to myself, “too much lake, not enough shed.” When I go back over something – I should have spent longer in the shed.
And then there are some bits you think, “Oh that’s too sheddy. I’m not sure you added a lot out of the lake that day.” And in a dream world, obviously, the lake gives you something good, but then you work on it properly in the shed and you turn out the finished product. And I even apply this to other writers. I’ll read something and I’ll think “This is pure shed.”
Read the whole thing, especially where she interprets her ‘Lake’ as being her “unconscious” mind and inspiration, consequently, being the effluvia of her unconscious aspect working to resolve her psychological trauma and issues. My PhD thesis was titled, ‘The Lake and the Shed: A Traditionalist Reading of the Work of J. K. Rowling.’ I believe that this 2019 ‘Museum of Curiosities’ interview was the critical turning point in Rowling Studies, the beginning of what Nick Jeffery and I call its ‘Fourth Generation.’
Again, as briefly as possible, what the ‘Lake and Shed’ metaphor revealed was, first, that Rowling understands that her inner daemon or Lady in the Lake who gives her story “stuff” is wrestling with her biographical issues, the nightmares of her individual existence as a person, as a woman, as a mother, as a wife, as a daughter, as a celebrity, etc. Rowling Studies until this point in late 2019 when Rowling all but threw us into her ‘Lake’ had largely evaded discussion of her artistry and meaning reflecting or being somehow consequent to her personal problems and history.
It’s been five years, and, though there has been significant resistance among Potter Pundits and Serious Strikers to treating Rowling the way every other author of renown is studied and understood, which critical treatment she has, per her ‘Lake and Shed’ metaphor, herself validated and invited, we are at last on the cusp of reading this author’s work in light of her biography.
What makes Rowling the most important and influential writer of our times, though, is her Shed work (in UK parlance, a ‘Shed’ is what in the US we would call a garage or work shop, say, for carpentry or mechanical hobbies).
The Genius Point or ‘G-Spot’
Every great writer and artist, of course, draws inspiration from what their ‘heart’ or transpersonal faculty makes of their inner world’s detritus, the radioactive flotsam and jetsam afloat in their souls. What makes Rowling akin to these ‘Greats’ and different from the host of Mary Sue and Marty Stu writers projecting their wish-fulfillment fantasies (or self-destructive depictions) onto the codex pages is what she chooses to make in her Shed of the story “stuff” given her by the Lake creature.
Rowling’s singular point genius, what I call the ‘G-Spot’ less as click bait I hope than as a memory hook, is to take this biographical material in story form she has been given and transforming it through her bibliographical artistry, the anagogical magic of traditional literature’s power tools, into stories that have borderline universal meaning and a transformative effect on her readers. Rowling’s inspirations from her unconscious mind have a cathartic, which is to say “purifying” literally and “healing” literarily, effect on her; her Shed work is her turning that remarkably personal experience into the effect her writing has on millions of those who read and love her work, a love founded in her delivering what they want most from story.
How does she do that? How is it more effective than what other writers today do?
The Triple Play: Rowling’s Three ‘Shed’ Power Tools
When Rowling is crafting her stories in her metaphorical Shed from the “glass like blobs” of inspiration she has pulled from the Lake of her unconscious mind, she has a host of tools ranging from clever cryptonyms and literary allusion to social satire and political subtexts. She pulls these tools from the walls of her literary workshop to give her stories their heft, their fun, even a helping of morality.
I think, though, after studying her work for almost a quarter century, that, like Ollivander and his three preferred wand cores, Rowling has three favorite Shed power tools that deliver the essential magic of her story-telling. Those three tools are the symbols, sequences, and transformations of literary alchemy, the allegorical depiction in characters of the faculties of soul, so-called “psychomachia,” and the chiastic structure of almost everything Rowling writes, what anthropologist Mary Douglas called “ring composition.” (I provide those links for readers unfamiliar with those terms or ideas because I want to keep this post as ‘tight’ as possible; apologies in advance to newcomers to this site for that succinctness.)
How these three tools work together to create a transformative and cathartic effect on readers is what I am calling Rowling’s “triple play” after the baseball term for a single precipitant, be it a batter hitting a pitch or a dropped third strike, that leads to three outs without another pitch being made to a batter. The key difference between Rowling’s Shed play and this sports metaphor is that while Rowling’s tools work together to deliver a punch, each of them is working simultaneously rather than one, then the other, then the last ‘out’ to retire the side or enlighten the reader’s imagination.
How this works was the essence of my thesis but let’s keep this short.
Literary alchemy is the use of metallurgical alchemy’s textual symbolism to depict the purification of the human soul, it’s illumination or enlightenment to be specific, with the Logos light of the world.
Rowling’s allegorical psychomachia, from the body, mind, and spirit triptych of Harry, Ron, and Hermione, to the Shakespearean diptych of soul and spirit lovers in Strike, to the child-toy transference in Christmas Pig are all effective means of engaging the ‘heart’ or Coleridgean imagination of readers with its reflection in story to cause it to identify sufficiently with that character’s transformation that he or she experiences something akin to that inner change.
Literary alchemy and psychomachia, both depictions of the soul’s illumination, are something like Siamese twins; once seen and understood, it is hard not to see how they are conjoined or work together.
That’s less true and as true of the third power-tool in Rowling’s kit, her ring composition or chiastic structures.
It’s less true only because it is not as obvious a link as that between literary alchemy and psychomachia. It is as true because the reason ring writing is, per Douglas, the universal method of effective story telling is because it delivers the same identification within the reader with his or her spiritual center, their ‘heart’ or personal logos, ‘small’ lambda. I explain how it does this in a post much longer than this one, ‘How does Ring Composition Work Anyway?’
Through these three complementary and subliminal bits of artistry, Rowling elevates her very personal, even intimate inspirations from her suffering unconscious mind, a place within her that bleeds story, into imaginative experiences that, to tease a favorite phrase of C. S. Lewis for what the best authors aim to do with their stories, transform and delight those that enter into them.
The easiest example for Rowling’s G-Spot and Triple Play artistry is her Christmas Pig, in my view her best and most characteristic stand alone work. The story of a boy and his toy pig beanie baby is filled, per Rowling’s testimony, with scenes from her blended family life with Dr Neil Murray and it does not take a rocket scientist to sort out the crisis her unconscious mind was struggling with when the Lake gave up the inspiration for this Dante-esque tale.
The Lake content of Pig I believe is this (from ‘Christmas Pig 1: Jack, John, Peter, John‘):
The Strike novels and The Christmas Pig reveal that the union has not been a Disney movie without significant struggle or conflict. The Strike novels are largely about male and female roles in light of vocation and the difficulty of a woman taking what has been traditionally a man’s role as her vocation while remaining fully feminine. It is no great leap to speculate that the Rowling-Murray marriage has had to contend from its start with the elephant in the room of the global-celebrity billionaire wife being the primary provider and public face of the family rather than the husband. Rowling’s heroic and sacrificial stand against the mad overreach of transgender activists and their supporters has largely been, I think, the fruit of her study and reflection in light of this struggle on the roles and identity of men and women as such, which is to say, respecting biological reality and boundaries while acknowledging, respecting, and nourishing the masculine and feminine aspects in every person.
The Christmas Pig differs from the Strike series in that it reflects another Murray family issue. It has as its foundation story the agony of a young child in a blended family whose biological father is absent physically and emotionally and whose older step-sister is a bully consequent to her own issues about daddy. The serious reader of Rowling and one even superficially familiar with her life does not strain his or her eyes to see David and Mackenzie Murray and Jessica Arantes here as the story models for Jack and Holly, especially as Mackenzie Jean Murray was seven years old in 2012, the year of the story’s inspiration and the age of Jack, the boy in the story.
The alchemy and psychomachian heft of Christmas Pig is the ‘Quadrigal Reading of Christmas Pig.’ The ring reading of that remarkable book can be found at ‘Christmas Pig 6: The Ring Composition.’
The inspiration is intensely personal; the author is a mother who has seen the children in her blended family struggle with that difficult change and come to love their new siblings in the end. Rowling’s artistry, however, her blending of hermetic symbolism, traditional chiasmus, and soul allegory, lifts that story so that those of us who have never been divorced or grown up in a blended family experience Jack’s transformation from a child with a broken spirit to a hero of Christ-like sacrificial love profoundly.
So what? Rowling’s best known work by far is her Harry Potter seven book series. We do not have the Lake source of her inspiration yet. When we do, I think we will begin at last to have an appreciation of how remarkably Rowling’s beneath the surface technical artistry has transformed the story “stuff” of her unconscious struggle.
Stay tuned!
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