The Philosopher’s Stone is one of my all time favorite books, especially when it comes to books I like to reread. Every now and then I will put Harry Potter on Audible and just listen, and it always manages to entertain me even though I know the story by heart by now. But after having listened to it so many times (and the greater series in general, but we’ll get to that another time) I’ve found that I’ve started analyzing the series as a whole and especially the Philosopher’s Stone as the first book in the series. Which is what we will cover in this text.

After countless rereadings and relistens to the Harry Potter franchise, I can safely say I’ve managed to come up with a few observations on Rowling’s masterpiece and even some insight into what makes Harry Potter so entertaining and successful.

So, the text that follows is my attempt at trying to answer the question, why does Harry Potter work? What can be learned from Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone?

Opening Contrast





Let us start with the opening scene. The first time we see the main character he is a baby being delivered on a doorstep. There all these weird and strange characters. An extremely old man in a robe appearing out of nothing, winking out lights with a silver instrument. There’s a cat who turns into a lady. There’s a flying motorcycle and a giant. This would’ve set the stage for the magical adventure we’re about to embark on. It really is a good first taste of what’s to come.



But we don’t start there. We start with the Dursleys. You might think this is a mistake after how I’ve praised the other scene above but I don’t. There’s a really important element in storytelling you need to be aware of when you write or create. That is that everything in your story is compared to everything contained within it, but not to the same degree to the things outside it. This is obvious if you think about it. If someone is shot in the james bond movie, you don’t blink an eye. But if someone is shot in the Pixar movie, you best bet your best bottom dollar that you’re two nanoseconds away from crying your heart and soul out through your eyeballs. (or filling a complaint with the theater for traumatizing your kids, but I digress)



This argument introduces the concept of contrast in storytelling. The emotional impact of your scene is to a large degree decided by the contrast it poses to everything else in the story, and this is especially true for the opening scene. This is why so many movies, books, television series, radio shows and stage plays start off with mundane scenes where eventually something extraordinary happens. If the movie starts off with a car chase, then continues with a car chase after character introductions, well, eventually car chases becomes normal in that world. If you however have a tooth brushing scene the first couple minutes, the moment the car chase starts after the main character gets in the car to drive to work, you create just that much more tension.



This is why starting with the Dursleys is so genius. Rowling probably knows this on at least some level since she even characterizes the Dursleys as uncommonly common. They are so normal, so dull and so boring that they could put a coked up squirrel to sleep. The contrast they pose to the magical society at large is startling, to say the least. This works so well that even though many of the following scenes are quite mundane as well, they get that extra little bit of magical atmospherical boost and sense of wonder. It works so well in fact, that even scenes where Harry is merely shopping, becomes almost like a small adventure. So in short, put contrast into your story.

Adverbial Elephant

Now, there is the proverbial elephant in the room, that is to be exact, the one made up of adverbs and dialogue attributions. Rowling is well known for using a lot of -ly words and an awful amount of different guffaweds and “said Harry angrily”. Rowling is in luck though, as most of these cases aren’t bad writing, they’re more like wasted opportunities for better writing. Your average reader will breeze past these things and won’t notice them too much.



I think there’s more to it than that though, and I believe I have an important observation to make. That is that bad writing and bad language doesn’t have to matter that much, if your writing is humorous. Because, as I would argue, adverbs and other shortcomings like telling too much (see Catch 22) doesn’t matter as long as you are funny. Any stand-up comedian will tell you as much. Is it funny?



The opening of the Philosopher’s Stone is very humorous. As is the series in general. I mean, most of the naming conventions are just straight up jokes. I don’t know if you’ve noticed, but Quidditch is a parody of sports. The rules are laughable if not downright dumb. Almost all the characters are quirky or strange in some way. The Philosopher’s Stone as an introduction to the series just doesn’t take itself very seriously, although it does so in a sort of endearing way. This lowers the barrier to entry quite a lot. The effect, I’d argue, is even greater for those who would be a bit suspicious to fantasy to begin with.



Humor is a great way to silence critics, if the social signals you are sending is that you aren’t taking yourself too serious, then you can hardly be criticized for being silly. It takes the sting out of the accusation. Of course, you do run the risk of not being taken seriously at all, but to alleviate this somewhat you don’t need to take someone seriously to laugh, and being able to laugh is reason in and of itself to read, so at least you have gained time. Rowling uses that time to great effect as we will discuss later.

Magical Setting

Now we come to the crux of the story I feel, the magnum opus of settings. People always bash on cliches as something tiring and to be avoided. But people miss out on the fact that telling a story takes quite a bit of time, and most people don’t have that much time to spend, especially if they can use that time on something else and get more out in a shorter amount of time. So it then becomes important to the author to try and tell a story in as little space as possible. Movies especially has this problem.



This is where cliches and pre-existing knowledge comes in. Instead of relying on any one cliche, you can instead use cliches as building blocks, and use them to generate interest in how you combine different cliches and which ones you use, rather than in the cliches themselves. We can expand on this further than cliches and try to identify common knowledge, culture, experiences and values. Or we could write to a niche.



This is why people read and write genres. Not only because they struck on something hard to define, but because they build upon themselves. Many younger fantasy fans don’t really get all the hype about the Lords of the Rings. But that may be because the genre has expanded and evolved since then, building upon the framework those first few titans built. We have a lot of common knowledge between us, and any one fantasy author can draw upon those expectations to present a lot of information in a short amount of time, subvert those expectations to shocking effect or just spend less time explaining and more time getting on with the story.



This is where Rowling makes a masterstroke of a decision to reverberate through the ages. She puts her story in a school. A school! (read this like Gimli when he talks about Moria) Again, this is also one of those things that makes such sense when you stop to think about it for a second. What is the one place where we all have insane amounts of common experience? What is the one place where we all have that one bad teacher, that one good teacher, that one bully, childhood friends. I could go on and on. Just by doing this one thing, putting the story to a school, she not only has a major demographic in kids and teens everywhere, she also gains all the nostalgics, which I would reckon, is just about everyone under the sun.



Moreover, what is a way to make a school setting fresh? Well, sprinkle some magic on that bad boy. She even goes a step further and has the story relate to a british boarding school. To some british children this is familiar, which works, but to most this is strange and weird. Rowling makes yet another master stroke though. She has Harry have no relatives or friends to miss. She removes the one negative trait of going to boarding school, thereby making the entire experience, well, you guessed it, magical. Since reading is often an escapism it’s not too far fetched to argue that most readers, even the ones with families and friends they love dearly, when they do decide to read, they are in a mindspace open to the idea of dreaming of a life away from everyone they know.

Story for the Timid

The book encapsulates many of the childhood memories that a lot of people have. Not because anything we remember happens exactly the same way, except perhaps a few of the school scenes as mentioned above. But because the atmosphere is the same. Harry Potter is in many ways a fantasy even the most timid soul can dare to dream about. Most of the events in the beginning relate to simple things like shopping on your own, actually being cared about, getting a birthday cake, getting your first pocket money or expanded freedoms.



The school setting also further expands on the argument of fantasy for the timid. It can be hard for some to imagine themselves as a sword wielding hero, killing the dragon. Not so for Harry Potter though, here you can almost not help but believe that you could’ve done many of the same things, even without much suspension of disbelief. I mean, we have all gone to school, and as the story presents the world, going to a magical school IS normal in that world right? At least for that subset of people.



That last sentence is perhaps unfortunate. Because Harry Potter is in many ways quite prejudiced. The Dursleys have their personalities extrapolated from their appearances, something you should never do in real life, and the personalities are all horrible. It’s ironic that for a story that would later end up becoming sort of a hallmark of liberal politics, there’s more than a little bit of fat shaming in it.The fact of the matter is that in the Harry Potter universe, most of the people are b-tier humans (the muggles) getting conned out of a serious amount of wealth (magic) by a small elitist society (the wizards).



But, it had to be this way. As introducing a fantastical world to a young or fantasy averse reader is very difficult. Which is why the story had to start in the real world, and is also why the fantasy world had to be a smaller one hidden away inside of our own rather than a separate place entirely. To have the setting set up this way enables an added sense of wonder as it allows for a daydreaming fantasy to build more easily. Ever thought about receiving a Hogwards acceptance letter out of the blue? So have we all.



The story also gains a lot from having an ignorant character being introduced to the fantasy world alongside us. It allows for very natural and organic dialogue that explains the elements of the world in detail, along with what the different characters reactions to those elements are. It allows for a concise summary, decreased confusion and a tighter story. As well as an opinion on what to think about that element right off the bat. In short, it gives us the tools to start thinking about the story for ourselves, without detracting from the narrative.

Conflict City

Another important thing to mention here is how the Philosopher’s Stone very quickly establishes a conflict, and a very strong one at that. The normalcy of the Dursleys and the weirdness of Harry Potter. The two parties are instantly and diametrically opposed at a fundamental non-negotiable basis. There’s intense dislike and the reader is very quickly faced with asking themselves how on earth this tension is going to resolve. The series also establishes sympathy by making him a very young orphan living in a closet with people who dislike him, whilst also building him to being a larger than life character who is intensely famous even as a baby.



But it’s not really before the Hogwarts Letter of Acceptance arc that a crystal clear conflict is presented and the story really rockets off from there and doesn’t land pretty much until the end. Just masterful. In short, have very clear cut micro conflicts (that is: motivations, goals and obstacles) and introduce them as early as you can.

An Aside on Accents

A minor thing I also like a lot about Harry Potter is the use of different accents in place of illustrations or excess descriptions to give us a preconceived idea of certain characters in a very short amount of time. Even in written form Rowling conveys these accents masterfully. She also plays into the preconceived ideas further to enhance the effect. In many ways, a lot of the characters in Harry Potter are stereotypical, but in a sort of kindhearted way. It’s almost as if Rowling is saying that although people are to a certain extent constrained within their experiences that shape them into a certain type of person, they are also in a sense elevated by it. Accents in general are a great tool to differentiate your characters for free (not without effort though, accents can be hard in written form!)

Four Houses

A perhaps a bit peculiar thing about the story and setup is how the three main characters Harry, Ron and Hermione are so clearly characterizations of three of the four houses. If you add in Malfoy as well then you have Harry as Gryffindor, Ron as Hufflepuff, Hermione as Ravenclaw and Malfoy as Slytherin. Yet three of these are in the same house: Gryffindor. This was in all likelihood done for the ease of the story. Rowling already doesn’t like how the dorms are separated so she actually has hermione just ignore these rules and walk into the boys dormitory. Imagine her frustration at having her three main characters be so separated.



Maybe this was a mistake. In general, Rowling struggles to develop the world properly on a macro level, that is at a big scale. She already has too few teachers at too many students. There are almost never any student tertiary characters introduced, and those who are introduced are mostly left in the dust to rot. Some exceptions are perhaps Neville and the Weasley kids. Perhaps Rowling should have not separated the houses so harshly and had the three main characters belong to three different houses.



This could have introduced a lot of characters in a natural way. Why does it take so long for us to get a view of the ravenclaw common room for example? I’ve often thought that there should have been a common common room, not just one for each house. Maybe winning the house cup could have granted you special privileges in this common common room to lord over all the other students. Now wouldn’t that have raised the stakes a bit further? The takeaway here is that even with all your focus on the microlevel at the start, don’t neglect macro decisions as well.



Another thing that is obvious in hindsight is how Harry Potter says it’s a fantasy novel on the cover but is in all actuality a mystery novel with a fantasy setting and a fantasy conclusion. The mystery portion is always masterfully done, the trio drag you into their theories about what is going on. Even though after a book or two you do get the sense that they aren’t seeing the full picture, it’s difficult to untangle what you think is going on yourself without going back and rereading multiple times. Still, it’s all always there. Upon rereading the novels you get a different appreciation for the story and its intricacies. On a micro level, Rowling always succeeds beyond most authors.

The Chosen End

The ending has us facing off against Voldemort, which was perhaps a symptom of how early the series was in its infancy. Rowling couldn’t really be expected to plan for the massive success she would achieve. The fact that she didn’t is in many ways how she managed to succeed. The standoff in book four should have been the first time we met Voldemort face to face. What a scene! And the scene could have been more impactful if we had only faced off against Quirrel and not Voldemort himself.



The story is about a chosen boy, which is a fantasy cliche like no other. I always wonder about that cliche, because I feel like it shouldn’t work. What is interesting about someone being chosen? You’ve laid out the plot right in front of me, and either you fulfill that plot promise and I knew it was coming all along, a lot of the tension and mystery is then drawn out of something that could have been more exciting and surprising without the prophecy. Or you don’t fulfill the promise and I’m disappointed unless you put a LOT of work in to make the alternative conclusion even better than the one you had promised. Rowling later tries to backpedal a bit on this part by nerfing prophecies. A very good fix but without the prophecy to begin with, she wouldn’t have had to fix anything.



One reason for having a chosen one story could be exactly for the predictability. It means the reader knows what he or she is getting into. It promises you a story of redemption, someone is going to save the day, and that someone is going to be the main character. It enables you to root for the main character from the start. You can then go into focusing on exactly HOW the main character saves the day and have the tension grow from that fact. Rowling also tries to play into that by making us question whether Harry will survive the series.

The Conclusion

Put mundane scenes at the start of your story to contrast the rest and elevate the tension. Use humour to pacify undue telling or bad language. Appeal to an audience through your setting alone. Have clearcut conflict and introduce it early, the first page is ideal. Don’t be afraid of accents and stay away from chosen one stories… or don’t! It’s all up to you. I hope you’ve gained some insight into Harry Potter and the literary elements it consists of and I hope it helps you in any of your own endeavors!



All images are borrowed from Harry Potter and the Philosophers Stone Illustrated edition, Illustrated by Jim Kay. Published by Bloomsbury Children’s Books 2015

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