J.K. Rowling is now closing the chapter on Harry Potter.

The chapter of her life related to it, that is.

According to this article, Rowling will publish a new postmodern fairy tale book, “The Tales of Beedle the Bard,” which was mentioned in the Harry Potter finale. This new book will be ultra-expensive, even adorned with silver and semi-precious gems. However, there is a rub: it’s not for mass-production.

One will be auctioned for a children’s charity, while the rest were given away as gifts.

Personally, I am no Harry Potter fan. But I like what she did for closure from Harry Potter, and I do have my insights on it.

Foremost on my mind is how she used this book as a vehicle to detach from the Harry Potter world that she knew for the 17 years that she said she lived in it.

I know what it is like to be emotionally involved in your work, in writing. But I’ve never written fiction that intensively, so I cannot relate to her need for closure and neurolinguistic programming-esque disengagement.

I wonder what it’s like to build a world of your own, a fascinating, mystical, one at that? I wonder if the reason why J.R.R Tolkien took to making his own Elvish tongue was that he could not detach from his world anymore? I wonder if any writer got so sucked in his or her fantasy/fiction world that he or she had gone crazy because he/she can no longer get out?

I do know that before her Christian (Catholic) “conversion,” the macabre had eaten up Anne Rice’s life to the point that she was already a hermit. I do know that Sylvia Plath and Virginia Woolf had committed suicide. Edgar Allan Poe and Ernest Hemingway were both alcoholics. I wonder if the pull of their worlds had been too seductive?

We writers just love living in our heads. I hope, that like J.K. Rowling, we can learn how to cope with the seduction that our fantasy worlds may have. I hope that we can learn how to detach, over and beyond the borders of our imagination.

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2 Responses

  1. Jay

    02|Nov|2007

    It’s good I didn’t venture into fantasy writing, or else I would probably have been sucked into the black-hole of living in a fantasy world.
    I wonder why some risk their sanity just to explore something that’s literally out of this world?
    But I think that question already answers itself. Special people may risk everything, even their sanity, to explore things beyond the horizon of the minds of ordinary people.
    That’s called genius. But it could look like a fool’s pursuit.
    Me, I’m not risking my sanity for anything. But I do want to know more about the power of the human mind, coz we really know very little bout it … despite all the progress achieved by mankind.
    Whew! I’m blabbering too much already ; )

  2. Lorie

    02|Nov|2007

    Haha, itz ok, it’s your blog too, heheh. :p

    But seriously, I believe the human mind is limited only by man’s non-submission to God. ;) to each his own eh? :)


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