Dementors, and Write What You Don't Know

Dementors, and Write What You Don't Know 

My son grew up on Harry Potter. One of our better parenting endeavors was instituting "family reading" - for a whole year, my son, his dad and I took turns reading the entire series out loud. We had already seen some but not all of each movie, because the movies were really, really scary. How on earth did J.K. Rowling ever come up with those frightmares known as Dementors? If you've just arrived from another planet, or Harry Potter isn't your cup of tea, a Dementor is described in the Harry Potter fanbase wiki page as, "a gliding, wraith-like Dark creature, widely considered to be one of the foulest to inhabit the world." They feed on the soul, generate feelings of despair, and can kill you.  

Maybe we have all known someone who just seemed to suck all the air out the room.  Maybe so did J.K. Rowling. Today, I popped in to see my son and I jokingly said I was a "drive by Dementor, trying to suck his ideas out of him." I then made scary sucking sounds, and he was like, "stop that, Mom." By the way, he is twenty now, long past the age of family reading, but I guess I am a somewhat convincing Dementor (or I totally embarrassed him, even though we were alone). Either way, I did tell him that I wanted to steal his ideas about the topic of "writing what you know."

What he said was interesting: "If you are writing about something you don't know, ground it in something you do."
I wrote that down, gave him a hug, and drove off.  Drive by Dementor, indeed. 

I read somewhere that "write what you know" is actually about evoking feelings, and not about facts and procedures and research. So, in our example, while J.K may have never met an actual Dementor before she wrote Harry Potter, she had suffered from severe depression, and understood the feeling of blackness and despair that come over you and suffocate you. She might also have been drawing from literature, folk lore, mythology and religion about the appearance and nature of demons.  So she could have combined what she knew emotionally (the dark, mental ravages of depression) with any number of demonic examples in existence. I don't actually know if this is true, as I have never spoken with her in person, but for the sake of an example, it is not too bad. 

I am going to move on to a different example, before I get a letter in the mail from J.K.'s attorneys. I'd like to go back to my National Novel Writing Month "winner", which has been hiding under my bed for two years (see previous posts), called Soul Cloud. The protagonist is Charlie Gellman, a nice boy from a troubled home, who has a bit of rough time in high school with fitting in and finding himself. Now, to my knowledge, I have never, ever, been a teenage boy. (Past life regression not withstanding.) But, I do remember way back about forty years ago, being acutely uncomfortable in high school, and what navigating all that was like. I also happen to have raised a teenage boy. And I wanted to write a protagonist based on said teenage boy. The same beta reader who inadvertently stopped the novel dead in its tracks, leaving it to languish under the bed, with dust bunnies its only company (see previous post) said this about my characterization of Charlie: "Charlie is perfect. His inner voice works beautifully and realistically and he is both believable and compelling."

This was a classic case, as my son put it, of  writing about something you don't know, grounded in something you do. I was able to pull off (according to my beta reader, who I grudgingly respect, and who had been a teenage boy) by  being grounded in my knowledge of raising a teenage boy and having suffered through the agonies of high school. I have to say, Soul Cloud may get resurrected yet.