Question:
How to stray from the Harry Potter stereotypes?
~*Emma*~
2010-09-28 14:08:39 UTC
I'm planning a novel right now. What's annoying me is that I wanted it to be about a magic school with a group of teens that attend the school learning all the mythical subjects (potions, magic, plants, dueling, etc).

Sound familiar? That's my issue!

How can I make it so that my book appeals to teens and kids and adults everywhere, but doesn't seem like a Harry Potter knockoff.

Brainstorm with me!
Five answers:
Cloaked Shadow
2010-09-28 14:15:40 UTC
Well to start try to set the school somewhere besides a castle or england

another thing would be to change to magic usage type from wands to something else

-staffs

-no item, just focus or say spell to work

-bardic

-ritualistic

-focus items like talismans

-etc.

Don't use similar history to school

If use of spoken spells choose a language like greek or celtic, not latin

That is as much as I can think off so far, hope it helps
jplatt39
2010-09-28 21:57:33 UTC
I'm actually finally reading the "Harry Potter knockoff" Tanya Grotter and the Magical Double Bass right now in English. It isn't, exactly, by the way. It does offer a lot of similarities but it also has differences which can present us with suggestions.



Harry Potter is actually the latest of a genre of juvenile novels. They have been going on for a long time and they are related to some rather adult books. Thus I find myself reading Tanya Grotter and thinking at one point of Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita (if you are over twelve go out and read it right now. It was a satire on life in the Soviet Union under Scientific Socialism, in which the Devil went to Moscow and was very happy because he didn't believe either. It doesn't "glamorize" Satan or Witchcraft, it just presents the USSR as so satanic it wasn't published till a brief liberalization twenty years after the author's death), on the one hand and Charles Finney's the Circus of Dr. Lao, which is almost a tone poem on the other.



In Juvenile books I recommend Alan Garner's The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and the Moon of Golmroth which depict two ordinary children, Colin and Susan, who fall in with a wizard in Devon named Cadellin Silverbrow, and Susan cooper's The Dark is Rising sequence, the first of which was made into a horrible movie called The Watcher.



One of the characters in the Grotter book is Medusa Gorgonova -- that is Medusa the Gorgon's Daughter. Um. Mythology is fair game. Henry Kuttner, who Rowling sometimes writes like when she is at her best, did a number of fantasies in the forties and fifties with titles like the Mask of Circe and the Dark World which featured characters like Circe or Medea, the Red Witch of Colchis. Grab Bullfinch or Edith Hamilton from your local library. Read them through thoroughly and research characters like the german Nixies and the sirens -- I have a small book of German folklore I literally found after someone discarded it in a free books pile with all kinds of fascinating legends. Rowling definitely did her research. Nicholas Flamel from the first book has been famous for hundreds of years. She is not always accurate but she understands that she is telling an adventure story. So just throw in anything you come across in your reading -- boldly. If you are wrong this is just a story not a research paper.



And that sums it up. You don't have to read everything I mentioned -- certainly Kuttner isn't essential -- but once you understand the context of Rowling's books then what is important is what is magical to you.
Kid A
2010-09-28 21:20:20 UTC
Hmmnm, you could experiment with the time era.

You could even make it another world, you know, something a little bit like Middle Earth.





Though, to be honest, any book about Wizards nowadays is pretty much doomed because of that very reason, it would be pretty hard to pull off.
2010-09-30 04:06:59 UTC
if you want to stay away from Harry Potter stereotypes, then don't write about a school that teaches magic
ACR
2010-10-02 10:10:23 UTC
And no vampires either. Although that doesn't come from HP.


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