A Lack of Imagination

'The best story, of course,
is the one you can't write,
you won't write...'

~ Sujata Bhatt, The Writer

~

2: In which Muggles feature heavily, and Luna has an idea

The idea came to her out of nowhere, in her first Muggle Studies class of the year, and a second later she was forming it into a question, and it burst out of her mouth before she could think any more about it; "Why isn't there any wizarding fiction?"

Professor Edwards smiled at her. It was the smile that never left her lips when she was dealing with questions from students, especially when teaching yet again the introductory third-year class on the exact definition of a Muggle. She was Muggle-born, and it was rumoured that she made a note of all the most amusing things said by her students to share with her family. Afterwards she would tear them up, although this was not a part of the rumour, and wished that wizards really were ludicrous, cartoon figures, as she portrayed them to the people who would never be able to see her place of work.

"Well, to be exact, Miss Lovegood, there isn't a complete lack of creativity on the part of the wizarding world. Magazines and comic books have thrived over the last hundred years, and there are a small number of novels written every year. However, for the large part, witches and wizards have devoted themselves to making use of the gifts given them rather than focusing on the craft of writing."

"But why do Muggles write so much, then?"

"Well, the creative outpouring on the part of the Muggle world since the early eighteenth century is partly due to - "

"That they haven't got anything better to do," said a Hufflepuff nearby.

Professor Edwards' eyebrows narrowed into points.

"I think you will find that Muggles on the whole make extremely good use of their time, despite not having been blessed with - " But for the next ten minutes she repeated the 'magic is a gift, not a birthright' lecture, which Luna had listened to the first time and unintentionally memorised through osmosis, and which nobody else ever listened to at all. There had been no question of her not being enthralled by Muggle Studies, right from the very beginning. How could she have resisted learning about a whole other world that had nothing to do with her? It was the same view that her mother had taken.

Celia Lovegood had been fascinated by Muggles. Not by the things they made, the aeroplanes and telephone wires and satellites which were stamped out on the landscape for anybody to see, but by the way they thought. A year before she died she had taken to frequenting second-hand bookshops and coming home with cartons of old volumes, revelling in the fiction and non-fiction alike. In fact she'd loved it best when they tried to blur the two, and told stories about Muggles living on the moon, or plunging to the depths of the ocean, or meeting monsters in the clouds. They had so much conviction in it all, she would say, they didn't believe that their stories were true, but they believed that they were worth something, and she would smile and smile about that.

For a few months after her mother died, Luna had avoided the books. Her father didn't read them, but they stayed in her mother's room for a long time, breathing within their pages. She would tiptoe in and think that she could see them swelling on the shelves, all those ideas cramped against one another. She had been quiet for a long time, then, the quietest she'd ever been in her life, unless you counted the beginning of her sixth year at Hogwarts. She'd begun to be a little frightened of believing, of making such grand leaps of imagination; her mother had run too far ahead of everybody else, testing out her spells, and now her mother was gone.

And there was enough in the real world to keep her own imagination occupied. There was her father, and The Quibbler, and learning about all the different answers there could be beneath other people's questions. Books were too dangerous.

Of course she had read every one of them before she got to Hogwarts.

~

Professor Edwards had explained that the wizarding world didn't have any time for imagination, but she hadn't really answered her question. Which wasn't very surprising, as Luna hadn't asked it, but that was a trifle she hadn't considered. She had wanted to ask if there were any reasons why she couldn't write, not just why she wouldn't. And it had turned out that the lack of wizarding fiction was once again due to the silliness of people in the plural, as her father liked to put it, and there were no good reasons. She hadn't been thinking of writing herself; it had been quite hypothetical. But now she'd found out that nobody else bothered with it, it had the same result as it usually did. Luna was converted.

She didn't bring any Muggle literature to Hogwarts, for reasons she had never quite understood herself, but she remembered the variety, the hundreds of stories that had danced in front of her eyes. She could plunge in at any point she chose. It would be so easy. She'd never had a shortage of ideas. Look at this one, this wonderful idea. Like all her sudden inspirations, it lit her up so brightly in the first few hours of its lifespan that she was too dazzled to see past the end of her nose, and therefore she didn't hear the students laughing as she walked through the halls of Hogwarts with her eyes wider than ever, skipping over a flagstone every so often. (They were four feet across in some of the corridors, so it required quite a considerable leap.)

When she reached her dormitory, she pulled out paper and a quill, and sat down to begin. For the first minute she was too excited to even form the words. There weren't any words in her head, anyway, only a succession of images, sparking with potential. She felt the same way as she had when she'd taken hold of her first wand all those years ago (the fifty-second one she'd tried) and it had started flashing white light intermittently, and she'd got excited and waved it more wildly, and turned her father's hat into a stalk of rhubarb. She'd always had an affinity with vegetables.

The ink dried before she could write a word. She found herself staring at an empty sheet of parchment.

Well, of course she was going too quickly, she had to select a story and a setting, she couldn't write everything at once. Luna seized upon the image of the violently blue ocean that was dancing through her head. She loved the idea of secret caves and depths of salt water, of storms and calms and pirates. It hung in front of her, glittering with story.

But she couldn't write about it. She tried. She took up the quill again and wrote 'The sea was - ' But she didn't know what she wanted to say about it. She only knew that she wanted to make everybody else think a bit more. There was too much to say, and all she had was her quill, with the entire ocean resting on top of it.

'She stood by the ocean - ' but who? Was she a witch, if this was wizarding fiction? Luna continued to write steadily, the green-inked lines mounting up on the page, and when the words had stamped out every bit of the sense of mystery and wonder she'd felt at first, she crumpled up the page and threw it away.

Perhaps she should have burnt it.

Victoria Flitchmarsh had never been subtle; two days later she began making pointed comments across the dormitory about sea bogles and shipwrecks. By the next day, she had become sympathetic; she considered herself the nicest of Luna's dormmates, and it made her feel better to contradict her own previous actions once in a while. She talked kindly to Luna about her writing, and suggested that she try and spend a little more time with other people; she was clearly withdrawing too much, and it couldn't be good for her.

Luna began tearing up her stories as quickly as they failed, so the other girls in her dormitory might snigger over the scraps, but wouldn't be able to put them together, especially as she burnt every third piece. She tried harder, sketching out her plots before she attempted to tell them, but that was even more dispiriting. They might look wildly exciting in her head, but when it came to put them to parchment they guttered out and died. She could be writing happily about somebody running away with a Muggle circus, and placing spells on all the animals and being found out by the Ministry, but when she saw the words on the page she wanted to cross thick black lines through them all. If only she could connect her own head directly to someone else's, everything would be easy.

It discouraged her so much that she became tired of trying to express her thoughts at all. Mr Lovegood was worried; he had never received letters from Luna before which simply said Hello how are you Hogwarts is fine. It was difficult to say what made it harder to read, the lack of news or the lack of commas.

It was at this point in her short-lived writing career that Hermione began to interfere.

~

As usual, Hermione seemed to have made her entrance at exactly the wrong moment in time, which she thought was ironic, considering how long she'd spent tinkering with it in third year. She found Luna in the library coaxing pieces of paper across the desk with her wand, and making strangely-shaped inkblots over a sheet of parchment, where her writing uncoiled itself in characteristic fashion, with large round 'O's and 'Q's that looked like a row of full moons across the page.

"Luna, I need to ask you something," she said, briskly, as she was never quite sure how to approach any subject with her. Luna looked up over the edge of her parchment, appearing to be utterly exhausted. Her pale eyes were slightly blurry for once, with no manic enthusiasm in them. Hermione supposed she ought to be relieved; it might make this conversation slightly easier.

"You know that Dumbledore's been working towards greater inter-house co-operation in the last year or so - " she said, but Luna was already nodding her head in slow motion, her earrings floating up and down, for all the world like two soap bubbles attached to metal hooks. Hermione blinked. They were soap bubbles. Well, that must have been a complicated charm; it didn't simply change the properties of the object, it blatantly defied them.

"Well," she said, bringing her attention back to the topic on hand, "the efforts so far haven't been completely successful - "

"I know," Luna said, still wearing her look of dreamy detachment. And of course, she did, Hermione thought. How could she have forgotten the fiasco of the debating club? It had been one of Dumbledore's enterprises last year, set up to vaguely adhere to the Muggle rules of debating, and with benign topics proposed at first - along the lines of the appropriate use of certain hexes, nothing to provoke much heated opinion. The idea had been to create a club in which all four houses might be equally represented, and in which they would not compete as houses - rather like the original intentions of the many other clubs in Hogwarts. Unfortunately, they had always split along traditional lines of house, with Gryffindor and Ravenclaw dominating the Charms club and the other subject-related groups, the Slytherins forming societies with arcane rules which looked considerably simpler from the inside, and the Hufflepuffs - well, the Hufflepuffs had their Gobstones. As prefect last year and Head Girl this, Hermione had felt it her duty to fully support all of Dumbledore's enterprises, and had spent a large amount of time talking - and in some cases, half-blackmailing - people into attending. But it had been a complete, unmitigated disaster. And if looking for one person to blame for that, you might not stray far from Luna Lovegood.

"You see, we'd like things to improve this year," Hermione said, suppressing her annoyance. "I've had an idea, and most of the professors seem to support it. It isn't a large-scale thing, but it's a start - perhaps we were being too ambitious last time - "

Luna appeared to be trying to hook a strand of her hair over her nose by tipping her head back and forth. She succeeded, sneezed, and collapsed back behind her sheet of parchment.

There was nothing for it but to continue. "There hasn't been any sort of school magazine, or even a newsletter, since the nineteenth century when the Hogwarts Harpy existed for ten years or so, and even then it seemed to devote itself to the most bloodthirsty stories possible, I've seen the back issues. Professor Binns went through them with me and found an account of his own death by dismemberment, I've never seen him so cross."

"Wouldn't all his arms and legs still be detached now then?" asked Luna with interest.

"I suppose so, if it were true," Hermione said. "Anyway, the idea is to start a magazine of some sort this year. It's another form of inter-house co-operation, and we'll be able to run all sorts of articles. It'll be less - inflammatory then a club." She shuddered slightly at the memory.

"It's quite difficult, finding enough interesting material for a magazine, you know," Luna said in a voice of great experience. "Daddy says that making people meet deadlines is difficult enough, and even if they do hand their work in on time, it often isn't what they said they'd write in the first place. Once he was promised a wonderful piece on the lettuces cultivated by the Black family to fend off intruders, you know, the ones with teeth, and instead he received something about black lettuces and flesh-eating slugs. It's amazing, really, that The Quibbler does as well as it does..."

"Quite," Hermione said, then swallowed sarcasm and the last of her pride. "Well, that's why I'd like to - ask you to join us, in producing the magazine. With your experience of publishing, it would be extremely - helpful." If she's involved from the start this time, she won't muck it up, Ron had argued. Anyway, she's not that bad, Hermione - might be fun.

There was a long pause as Luna considered the ink blots on the page in front of her. Then she looked up again, and smiled in a rather insane way. "Of course I'll help," she said. "Do you think this one looks more like two faces, or a Heffalump with horns? I think the Heffalump, myself..."

"Certainly the Hefflalump," Hermione agreed. Anything for peace and quiet.

"Of course, that's a trick from Muggle psychology, and I don't believe in it, do you?"

Of course, thought Hermione, the first time Luna finally stated that she didn't believe in something, it had to be a respected and well-researched science. "Well, I don't see anything wrong with the basic principle - " she began. Naturally, Luna wasn't paying attention. She appeared to be widening her eyes fraction by fraction until they resembled nothing more than two-pound coins.

"But you're a Muggle," she burst out, sounding, for a strange moment, exactly like Mr Weasley.

Of all random comments, that had to be the least applicable to the situation on hand, and it was the last straw. "For goodness' sake, Luna!" Hermione exploded. "I wish you'd explain your ridiculous train of thought to me, for at the moment, it makes no sense at all. Apart from the obvious fact that I - I'm a witch, I don't understand why you're talking about Muggles in the first place, and even if it were relevant, I wouldn't have thought you'd be so prejudiced. A better attitude towards Muggles and Muggle-borns is exactly what we've been trying to make people think about for years - "

"But you know Muggles. That's what I meant," Luna said, unperturbed. "And I think about them all the time, I've read so many of their stories, and I think they're wonderful. I think it's so clever, how Muggles use their imaginations, when we don't bother at all - "

"That's only fiction," Hermione said, not understanding why she felt so irritated all of a sudden. Perhaps it was the tone that Luna had taken, though it had hardly been unusual - Aren't Muggles interesting?

"But it isn't only fiction, it's very important," Luna said, looking at Hermione with a new respect. "I thought you would understand that."

"Why should I?"

"Because you're a - " With a look of extreme consideration for Hermione's idiosyncrasies, Luna amended her sentence. "Because your parents are Muggles."

"Well, I've hardly read any literature not from the wizarding world since I was eleven, and my parents prefer non-fiction," Hermione said shortly.

"Oh." Luna peered up at her, then she ripped her sheet of parchment into several dozen pieces and remarked as she did so, "Poor you."

Hermione left with a sigh of exasperation at the entire situation, but not without an uneasy feeling that Luna's last words had sounded curiously akin to - 'Just you wait.'