Tag Archives: harry potter

here’s my inner pain, bitches!

I was reading some so-so fanfic the other day, and I recognised this particular juvenile, immature quality in the writing that I still battle with in my own writing. It looks like this: Characters are in conflict with each other and then they have an emotional scene where they SAY ALL THE EMOTIONS TO EACH OTHER. ALL! THE! EMOTIONS!

Then Cat pointed out to me exactly what’s going on in a scene like that: The characters are vocalising all their inner pain. ALL their inner pain.

The whole point of inner pain – ahem – is that it is not made outer.

Obviously the inner pain has to become external at some point – or there have to be at least enough clues for the reader to begin to understand the pain a character is carrying around with them – or else what’s the point of having it at all?

A great example of inner pain: Severus Snape. He’s absolutely awful (his inner pain doesn’t stop that from being true), but when Harry ends up naming his son after him, we cheer. Why? Because it turns out that Snape had to bear the burden of Dumbledore’s death, and looked out for the son of a man he couldn’t stand, all for the love of Harry’s mum. If we hadn’t found out his inner pain he would just have remained awful – not to mention, we would probably have still thought he was evil.

So: revelation of inner pain = good.

However, imagine if Snape had run around yelling I have inner pain, feel my inner pain, THESE ARE MY FEELINGS AND MY INNER PAIN!

It would soon have become a bit awkward – not to mention boring – and it wouldn’t have mattered so desperately what side he was really on. It’s also the emotional-moral-highground equivalent of whinging. After a while you just feel like yelling, “Get over yourself and do something already!”

Which brings me to the quandary I find myself in now.

I’m approaching the final chapters of my novel (*incredulous imminent celebration*) and I have all these outstanding emotions that need to be resolved between characters. But as per this whole rant so far, I don’t want those characters to just speak their emotions at each other and resolve through sheer volume of emotive statements.

One thing I try to keep in mind is this: Having full-on emotional conversations – the kind that are truthful and confronting enough to actually cause change or resolution within a relationship – are not easy, or nice, and quite often afterwards it’s more difficult to see that person than less.

And sometimes saying all your feelings can actually do much more harm than good. It can be a hurtful, messy thing, and there’s no objective marker to tell you when you’ve said too much, or to remind you that saying all the things isn’t necessarily the way to move a relationship forward.

So often in fiction a good emotional bout solves everything. And I simply find that hard to swallow.

I’m trying to remember, as I navigate these scenes, that it’s often the difficult things to hear that make the difference – not the verbal/emotional diarrhea. It’s when you say the simple thing that is harder to say than spewing out your pain. It’s the observations you make for yourself, when you decide to look around and reevaluate your world.

And yes, hopefully there are fewer bodily fluids involved.

and then there was fan fiction

It took a long time for me to be okay with reading romance (trashy genre fiction with swooning water-coloured heroines on the cover). Then I went into defiance – head up when I checked the books out at a library, daring the librarian to judge me for it. Then I went into campaigning for the rest of my world to understand what a treasure trove my chosen genre really is.

Now I find myself at the beginning all over again…with fan fiction.

Even though I’ve struggled both internally and externally against the perceptions attached to a genre, fan fiction feels shameful. If romance is at the bottom of the genre pile in people’s estimation (and it is), then fan fiction sits in some murky water below it.

Cat gave me a Harry Potter fanfic to read, because it had a great example of the awful I love you that I was talking about all the time. So it wasn’t her favourite example of fanfic – she rated it 6 out of 10 – but that wasn’t the point.

The unintended side-effect was that I LOVED IT.

You may remember that I’ve been going through a distressing case of identity-crisis-inducing reading ennui. For the last couple of days I simply haven’t been able to stop reading.

I’m trying to pinpoint what is so great about it, but as I’m such a newcomer to the genre it’s all a bit hazy. Initially I really couldn’t understand why Harry Potter of all the books would generate more fan fiction than any other story out there (aside, of course, from the obvious fact of it being the most popular series of all time). It seemed to me like such a childish (and that’s not meant to be derogatory) story to have such an intense following.

But the whole point of Harry Potter fanfic, as I’ve discovered, is to invert the original story in ways that are unavoidably fascinating.

Maybe every story is made up of itself and, unspoken, its inverse. Going into the world that shadows it – that exists because it isn’t – feels somehow complex. Unlike the story that made it, it can’t exist on its own. It has to be made of facets, and possibility. It also seems to contain all the unanswerable yearning of the original which, as you may be able to guess, is irresistible to me.

There’s one author I’m particularly enjoying, and her Draco Malfoy is the most charming, charismatic, awful, insecure, amazing creation. I’ve often felt inadequate when writers talk about the books they re-read for inspiration. But this – when I am struggling to imbue a character with that something that makes them light on fire, I will re-read this.

Then there’s my new Kindle, which changes everything. It means I don’t have to approach these stories as Deemed Worthy of Publication and find them missing, or as a guilty pleasure I’ll kill my eyes with by reading off the computer.

It doesn’t have to be polished and thoughtful and structured and perfect. It can be an exciting idea, an adrenaline rush of potential, an over-the-top exploration of all the best bits with none of the rest.

And who says fiction can’t be like that?