Hogwarts Professor

Rowling’s 2019 interview for the BBC’s Museum of Curiosity was where she chose to roll out her mental metaphor for her method of writing, namely, the Lake and the Shed. In brief, the Lake is how she visualizes her unconscious mind giving her the unshaped story stuff, something like “molten glass,” that she works into proper narrative form with her literary toll kit in the Shed. She admitted that this source of inspiration was cued to her subconscious struggling to resolve issues. You can read more about that interview and her much more recent version of this metaphor by reading The Lake and The Shed: Rowling Reveals Her Writing Process or listening to the ‘Rowling Studies’ podcast about the author’s 2024 ‘On Writing.’

Note that in the 2019 interview, Rowling says she never sees what it is that is in her Lake:

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.

In May of this year, though, Rowling admitted that she had a very clear image in her imagination of what the story-inspiration-genie or Lady of her Lake looked like:

Images of that android amphibian are readily available, of course. Not an especially handsome guy, at least, not if your mental picture was something akin to illustrations of the Lady in the Lake from Tennyson’s Idylls of the King as mine was. What’s interesting to me, though, was Rowling’s description of the movie creature as looking “EXACTLY like the thing I imagine” in her metaphorical Lake and the powers of this creature in ‘The Shape of Water.’ If you’re not familiar with the movie, I attach both the trailer and a YouTube quick telling of the story below this post and the Wikipedia plot summary can be read here.

There are three dots that I think Rowling is connecting here: her core belief about imagination as such, the power and substance of the “unconscious” mind, and the Logos or Christ. I’m sure that must seem a reach, but bear with me. The title of my PhD thesis was ‘The Lake and the Shed: A Traditional Reading of the Work of J. K. Rowling,’ so I’ve given this Lake subject and Rowling’s ideas of the imagination some thought. Join me after the jump for my connections of those implausible dots. [Read more…]