This may be upsetting to some people, but Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban is my least favorite Harry Potter movie. While the time turner business is certainly a compelling plot device—and the hippogriff, Buckbeak, is pretty cool—I can’t seem to find my interest held by going back and forward in time and watching the scene of Buckbeak’s death over and over again from different angles. Long before our class today with our current artist in residence, Margot Perin, I had this feeling that time, in any story, is certainly not something to be messed with.
This is what we talked about in class today—how time is sped up in some stories and how it is slowed down in others. For example, in a horror story, time is usually slowed, to create tension—the writer might describe the moment footsteps are heard behind the main character, elongate the seconds they take to slowly open the door. In Harry Potter, J.K. Rowling elongates the moment Harry picks up his wand, the look on his face, the spells he casts when he battles Voldemort, and describes it in much more detail than when he’s simply walking to, say, the Leaky Cauldron.
Ok, now that I’m done geeking out— we finished the day breaking up into groups and writing stories with our prompt being only the two words “gender neutral person” and “train.” I’m not going to say that my group’s story was the best, but we did include a beautiful Russian named Fattoush selling hot buns and an exorbitant amount of train puns.
Also, this is a picture (courtesy of the coolest freshie cat, Solange) of CW enjoying cookies and is super relevant to this blog post.
Creative Writing 