Learn How To Write A Novel By Reading Harry Potter

By Scott King and Clark Chamberlain

Learn How to Write a Novel by reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone!

Learning how to write a novel is hard, but doing so by studying one of the best-selling, most-beloved novels of all time makes it a lot easier.

In this book, authors and former college professors Scott King and Clark Chamberlain will teach you how to write a novel using Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone as their study guide and example.

Each chapter ends with a collection of take aways. To make everything easier to remember and reference, they are reorganized at the end of the book to serve as the perfect guide for helping you write your novel.

Some of the topics covered in this book include:

• Three Act Structure
• Character Arcs
• World-Building
• Creating Conflict
• Layering Mysteries
• Character Development
• Character Voice
• Author Voice
• Active vs. Passive Characters
• Crafting Descriptions

Delve into a deep critical analysis of what makes Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone so special and use the techniques uncovered to craft your own story! 

Neither the authors nor the publishers are affiliated with Rowling, Scholastic, or Bloomsbury. This book is a literary analysis of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone and does not imply any recommendation or affiliation with the Harry Potter franchise. It is meant to further scholarship and is not a spin-off, companion volume, sequel or prequel to the Harry Potter series.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Scott King
• Release date: Oct 30, 2018
• ISBN: 9781726656993

Book preview

Introduction

Welcome to Learn How To Write A Novel By Reading Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. I’m Scott King and I have co-written this book with Clark Chamberlain. In many ways, this book is a re-read of the first Harry Potter novel, but with a slant. Even though Clark is an active college professor and I’m a former college professor, our re-read is geared to not only pick out themes or help a reader prepare for a quiz or book report. What Clark and I want to do is to teach you how to write a novel, using Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone as the central example.

Readers love Harry Potter and, whether you are a fan not, as someone interested in writing it’s worth examining how J.K. Rowling wrote the novels to see what techniques you can apply to your own writing.

Learn How To Write A Novel By Reading Harry Potter is meant to be read alongside Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. The chapters in this book are numbered to match those in Harry Potter. We suggest you read a chapter in Harry Potter, then return here to read the analysis that goes with it. Each chapter will include a list of take aways that you should note and at the end of this book all the take aways will be grouped together for easy reference.

There are lots of books a would-be author should read, but it makes sense to teach how to write a novel via Harry Potter because the series as a whole is such a powerhouse that has infiltrated pop culture and literature in a way that no other series has.

Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was published in 1997 in the U.K. and 1998 in the U.S. At the time of this writing, it’s just over twenty years old and yet is already a true classic and will be loved for generations to come. It is the book that launched one of the best-selling series of all time. Because of both its cultural impact and its literary merits, it is worth studying.

According to a press release put out by Scholastic in 2017, the seven books in the Harry Potter series have sold more than 450 million copies. The movie franchise has made more than $7 billion and the novels have been translated into sixty-seven languages. Considering that the series has only existed for two decades, those are astounding numbers.

The tone and genre of the series shift with each of the books so that the early novels are clearly middle grade, but as the characters age, the books become Young Adult.

The novel is 76,944 words long. The original U.K. edition had 223 pages and the original U.S. edition had 309 pages. For a children’s middle-grade novel, that’s a bit long. Most middle-grade novels live around the 50,000 word count and so right off the bat, it’s clear that Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone was written and published not to fit into a mold or traditional label, but to tell the story it intended to tell.

As the series was originally published, many readers got to grow up in real time with Harry, Hermione, Ron and the rest of the characters. The novels were so loved that teachers and librarians incorporated them into schools. It became socially acceptable to like Harry Potter and as a result, it helped shape a generation of children.

The original fans of Harry Potter are old enough now to have children of their own, so although the series has been wrapped, the cycle will continue, passing from one generation to the next. That’s the power of the series and the power you can learn by studying Rowling’s writing.

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- Scott King

February 3rd, 2018

Chapter One

The Boy Who Lived

Chapter Summary:

The chapter is broken into two halves with the first following Vernon Dursley and the second focusing on Albus Dumbledore.

Vernon goes about his mundane day, slowly piecing together that weird things are happening. He sees lots of owls, people in strange clothes, and unusual terms like muggle. By the midpoint of the chapter, he is worried that the oddities have to do with his sister-in-law Lily Potter, her husband James, and their son Harry.

The day ends and when it does, Albus Dumbledore uses a Put-Outer to hide his arrival to the Dursleys’ house. He never goes inside, but instead chats with Mrs. McGonagall, who has the power to shape-shift into a cat. Through their discussion, it is revealed that the strange events do have to do with Vernon’s extended family. A powerful entity called Voldemort killed Lily and James, but their son Harry lives.

Hagrid arrives on a flying motorcycle and gives baby Harry to Dumbledore. Dumbledore writes a note and leaves Harry on Vernon’s doorstep. The next morning Harry is discovered by Petunia Dursley, Vernon’s wife and Lily’s sister.

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Point of View:

The first half The Boy Who Lived is told mostly from Mr. Dursley’s point of view and the second half is told mostly from Albus Dumbledore’s point of view. However, mixed in are moments where the narrator talks directly to the audience. This type of viewpoint is referred to as Third Person Omniscient. It’s commonly used when there is a distinct narrator or storyteller telling a story.

The point of view is made clear in the second sentence of the book with the phrase, You’d expect. The fourth wall is broken and the narrator directly talks to the reader. It happens again four paragraphs later with the sentence, When Mr. and Mrs. Dursley woke up on the dull, gray Tuesday, our story starts, there was nothing about the cloudy sky outside to suggest that strange and mysterious things would soon be happening all over the country.

The use of you’d and our establishes the narrator as someone who knows the full story of what is going on and isn’t limited to the knowledge that specific characters might know. By doing this, the storyteller is able to set things up and play with how the reader is aware of things that the characters themselves don’t know. This happens in the first half of the chapter with Mr. Dursley. From the start, the reader is aware that strange and mysterious things are happening, but it takes half the chapter for Mr. Dursley to come to terms with that.

Mr. Dursley goes to work. With his desk facing away from the window, he doesn’t see the owls swooping about, but because of the storyteller-style narrator, the reader sees the owls. The juxtaposition of known information can be used to create a sense of irony, conflict, and anticipation.

It is made clear to the reader that Mr. Dursley wants a bland, normal life. The narrator also makes it clear to the reader that strange things will happen and shows strange things happening. This creates anticipation because the reader is then expecting and waiting for Mr. Dursley to be let in on the secret and waiting to see his reaction to the abnormal occurrences. This kind of manipulation is like allowing the reader to be let in on an inside joke, and then getting them excited for the joke to be made public.

Point of view is a tool and picking what kind of viewpoint you wish to use should be one of the first meaningful decisions you make. Throughout the entire novel, Rowling makes use of the narrator’s voice to provoke, twist, and direct the reader.

All stories are written in a specific point of view. It is the technical way in which a story is communicated. Point of view is the lens and window through which the reader sees the story. There are four main types of point of view: first person, second person, third person limited, and third person omniscient.

First person is when a story is told from a character’s immediate view. In these kinds of stories the pronouns used are I, Me, and My. Using first person gives the reader an open door to the character’s thoughts and when done right it can bond a reader to a character faster and more thoroughly than other points of view.

Second person is less popular and more commonly used in choose-your-own-adventure-style books, non-fiction, or literary fiction. The pronouns used with it are you and your. Unless you are an experienced author and truly know what you are doing, you are better off avoiding second person.

Both kinds of third person points of view use pronouns like she/he/they and hers/his/theirs. In a limited point of view, the story stays close to a single person’s thoughts and doesn’t stray. In omniscient, the narrator knows everything that is happening and thus the viewpoint can jump around from character to character.

Third person omniscient has fallen out of style in contemporary fiction. It is still used and a valid way to tell a story, but takes more skill to pull off. If you are writing a novel in third person, you need to make it clear from the start if it is limited or omniscient. Switching between the two will cause reader confusion, and that is bad. You don’t want anything in your novel that will pull your reader out of the story. Every time they are pulled out, there is the chance they will decide to not go back into it.

Handling third person omniscient takes skill. Dune is considered one of the greatest novels told with it, and Rowling does a wonderful job of using it in The Boy Who Lived, but as you continue reading through the rest of Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, you’ll notice she shies away from it into a more limited view, only breaking it with purpose. If she hadn’t established the omniscient narrative voice in chapter one, this is not something she would have been able to do.

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Establishing Character:

One of Rowling’s special skills is her ability to create and show character. Throughout the entire series, there are hundreds of characters and yet they each have a distinct feel and personality. As we proceed through Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone we will look at some of the tricks she uses to make this happen.

The novel opens with the sentence, Mr. and Mrs. Dursley, of number four, Privet Drive, were proud to say that they were perfectly normal, thank you very much. They were the last people you’d expect to be involved in anything strange or mysterious, because they just didn’t hold with such nonsense.

From the very first sentence, it is clear who the Dursleys are. They are stuffy, rigid, and care more about looks and appearance than anything else. These are relatable traits and there is a good chance you know people like this. Maybe your neighbor, a co-worker, or that one snobby guy from high school is obsessed with being normal.