Learning From J. K. Rowling Books - Part 1

Now that we’ve covered the Elements (i.e., Showing and Telling about Characters, Setting, and Plot by Description, Action, and Dialogue), let’s finally move on to examining books by J. K. Rowling and Stephenie Meyer.

Read Chapter 1 of "Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone" by J. K. Rowling.  Don’t read it like leisure reading.  Try to identify the Elements and how they are arranged.  Look for patterns.  Below is the book text with my comments.  

“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.”

J. K. Rowling starts of by Telling us about 2 characters (Mr and Mrs. Dursley) and the setting (Privet Drive).  In fact, these first 3 paragraphs or so are like a narrator voice introducing us to the story.  If you are writing about a mystery, then its good to introduce it as soon as possible.  In the second sentence, he already have a hint at the Plot that something “strange or mysterious” will happen. So in the first paragraph, we have something about the Characters, Setting, and Plot.

“Mr. Dursley was the director of a firm called Grunnings, which made drills. He was a big, beefy man with hardly any neck, although he did have a very large mustache. Mrs. Dursley was thin and blonde and had nearly twice the usual amount of neck, which came in very useful as she spent so much of her time craning over garden fences, spying on the neighbors. The Dursleys had a small son called Dudley and in their opinion there was no finer boy anywhere.”

Telling and Showing (through Description) about characters, the Mr and Mrs. Dursley.  Note that J. K. Rowling does not give us an exact photographic description of the two.  She instead focuses on their contrasting necks to Describe their personality.

We also have our first pattern: Tell-Describe.  Here we tell about something or someone with a general statement and then describe it in more detail.  It could be called the “General-Specific” pattern.

"The Dursleys had everything they wanted, but they also had a secret, and their greatest fear was that somebody would discover it. They didn't think they could bear it if anyone found out about the Potters. Mrs. Potter was Mrs. Dursley's sister, but they hadn't met for several years; in fact, Mrs. Dursley pretended she didn't have a sister, because her sister and her good-for-nothing husband were as unDursleyish as it was possible to be. The Dursleys shuddered to think what the neighbors would say if the Potters arrived in the street. The Dursleys knew that the Potters had a small son, too, but they had never even seen him. This boy was another good reason for keeping the Potters away; they didn't want Dudley mixing with a child like that."

Note the Tell-Describe pattern.  The Dursleys have a secret and the rest of the paragraph is Telling us about the Potters, the Dursley secret.