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672 pages, I see. Not too much editing going on there then...
Given that the previous book, Order of the Phoenix, was well over 800—and a shambling, shapeless mess at that—I actually take some hope from that page count.
Rowling's stuff is always going to be sli-i-i-ightly too long—it's part and parcel of the immersive experience she's after, and that the kids love so much—but I honestly feared that the books were going to continue getting longer and sloppier up til the end. I think that after writing Order, with the end of the story in sight, she's turned a corner and rediscovered the idea of momentum.
I think when you're working on something of this scale, there's a tenmdency to hit a wall somewhere towards the middle. Some writers stop dead and never finish their big sagas. But some, before they muster themselves to write through the wall, try instinctively to write around it. They bog down in the details, moving laterally until they find their way forward again.
It's a form of writer's block: storyteller's block, I guess you could call it, since you keep writing—but the writing doesn't actually move the story along.
In Michael Chabon's Wonder Boys, for instance, the lead character is thousands of pages into an unfinished and unfinishable novel, stuck deep in the mud, but keeps plowing deeper—writing hundreds of pages of genealogies of the characters' stable of horses, for instance. That struck me as very true-to-life.
In the real world, a similar thing happened with Stephen King's Dark Tower books. The fourth in the series (Wizard and Glass) was the longest, arguably the most ambitious, certainly the worst-written of the lot. Once he'd passed this huge, indigestible lump, though, the remaining books in the series were increasingly swift, involving, and self-assured. Here's hoping the same holds for La Rowling. |
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