Writing for generations
Devon Eriksen @Devon_Eriksen_ After some recent trends, I finally decide to read the Harry Potter books. And I came away with something I didn't expect. I came away with an understanding of what makes a generationally beloved classic. It isn't authorial skill. Rowling is certainly talented, but, at least at the time, she was also relatively unpolished, and the series has plenty of rough patches. Uneven pacing, awkward plots, exposition dumps, two-dimensional secondary characters. I could write quite a few lines about what might be fixed. And I probably will at some point. But none of that matters. Because a generationally beloved classic is almost never the best book of a generation. A generationally beloved classic is the book that most perfectly captures what that generation yearns for . Hogwart's School of Wizardry did that for millennials, just as the quest to destroy the One Ring did so for the boomers. Boomers grew up hearing tales of recent history, a...