What I Learned From JK Rowling
I’ve been on a JK Rowling Marathon the past two weeks. I loved Harry Potter since I was a kid, and realized I never studied the person who created it, or how.
I set out to learn more.
The best resource turned out to be YouTube, which had a lot of older interviews and TV spots like 60 minutes, Oprah, and BBC specials. After collecting quotes and observations from ~10 hours or so, organized them and will share some of the highlights with you here:
What Made JK Rowling
JK had a rough start:
Dad was an asshole
Mom had multiple sclerosis
First husband was an asshole
Early career was a struggle
Clinical Depression
Single mother on welfare in her late 20s.
As she says, “rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.”
Since she was old enough to understand what books were, she wanted to be a writer. In college, she studied classics and Greek mythology to serve this purpose.
As JK mentioned in her Harvard Commencement Speech (much more eloquently) she saw some incredibly savage shit working at Amnesty International in her 20s. These were years of personally seeing people and families endure the impact of wars, atrocities, and evil.
She has always been introspective, thoughtful about death (which is the main theme of the Harry Potter series.) Her mother died 6 months after she started working on HP, and never knew about the project. JK said the tone turned darker after her mother passed, since she was dealing with all of these issues herself.
What Made Harry Potter
Knowing something of her life and interests, we can see how HP is the shadow of JK.
Hearing the theme was “death” and JK processing the loss of her mother (the only parent she had a relationship with), many things click together:
Voldemort’s quest for immortality
Harry defiance of death as a newborn
Mirror of Erised
Thestrals
Ghosts
Photo by Samuel Regan-Asante on Unsplash
Her desire for a stronger father figure gave life to the many idealized father-figure characters of the books: Sirius Black, Dumbledore, Hagrid, Lupin, and Arthur Weasley. (JK loved writing Dumbledore, because he would “tell her what she needed to hear.")
It’s fascinating how authors are all of their characters, in constant conflict and conversation.
In addition to her life, she pulled many inspirations from real events. When considering the ending, she knew characters had to be killed in the war for it to be a work of honest fiction. What happens in war? People die. People snap. Some of them survive. The most heroic are able to rebuild.
JK leaned heavily on the British literary tradition of magic stories and myths. She collected existing ideas, words, stories and more to combine them in her world. This gave us a sense of familiarity with the world, and made it easier to create a rich, deep world without a ton of explanation (because we already know roughly what unicorns, goblins, and wands are.)
She spent 6 years planning out all 7 books as she wrote the first one. The first outlines of all 7 books were laid out in story grids. She drew pictures of characters, collected names, planned all of the bloodlines and alliances between students and parents to set up the entire escalating conflict.
"These aren't sequels, this is one story broken into 7 novels for the readers convenience."
JK knew the end from the beginning. The end of the series would be a huge battle at Hogwarts and set this up from the very beginning (“the safest place to hide something”, “Voldemort could never take the school,” etc.) She knew Harry needed to walk alone to face his fate in the forest, and that she would have Hagrid carry him back to the castle afterward. (A draft of this final chapter was written early on, even before books 4, 5, and 6.)
This level of planning let her set up characters and settings multiple books early. (The dragon escaping from Gringott’s, for example.)
Juggling this amount of detail wasn’t always easy. In one documentary, she showed 15 previous drafts of Book 1, chapter 1. She said they all had the same failing: “they gave too much away.”
It took 17 years to plan and complete the writing for all 7 books.
She didn’t know it ahead of time, but her early planning was a huge advantage later on. It showed studios they could bet on her completing the series with cohesion and quality. As the movies ramped up, studios, directors, and actors needed to know key pieces of entire character arcs in order do do them well.
The meticulous planning and outlines also helped her keep her writing pace, which encouraged the pace of the phenomenon to accelerate. As we know from some other authors, this is no easy feat (*cough* George RR Martin, Patrick Rothfuss *cough*)
Someone on another podcast joked "Harry Potter is basically a detective" in these novels. This clicked a few more things together for me:
JK does love detective novels and crime stories. She wrote murder mysteries under pen name “Robert Galbraith” after she was done with HP.
HP books have the pace and allure of mysteries – you are always guessing, wanting to know what comes next or “whodunit”!
Surprise twist endings in all of the books, with red herrings and real culprits along the way (Snape → Quirrell, Draco → Ginny, Sirius → Wormtail, Karkaroff → Crouch Jr.)
Writing Tips I Picked Up
My first epiphany–which is the single most obvious thing ever–is how much comes from one of two places: 1) Her life. 2) Research.
When I actually think about it, where else could it come from?? But I had the impression fiction authors “just thought of these things.” Duh.
Example: her lifelong friend from high-school drove a Ford Anglia, the car in the second book. He was the inspiration for Ron, a loyal friend who is always there when you need him.
“It's a cruel world, but a mirror of our world.”
She shows us human nature is human nature, with or without magic. A magical world lets us see our own human foibles and failures clearly. If that world seems too cruel… our eyes are not truly open to our own. More powers don’t mean a better world, but the same human challenges.
"Harry's primary purpose is to be our eyes into the world." Heroes rarely seem to be the deep, interesting characters.
Ron and Hermione are interesting characters. Hagrid, Dumbledore, and Sirius are too. Harry is a bit of a blank slate. Like Frodo or Neo. Harry as the hero does hold the moral center of the story, through his actions. He’s a vessel for our reading and our lessons, not someone we’re supposed to interact with as readers.
JK talks about being comfortable with some emotional coldness or cruelty to her characters, as a writer. She has the realism to know "the playground is a brutal place" and not try to hide that truth from readers, children or not.
In this context and others, JK repeatedly says (paraphrasing): we underestimate children, their taste, and what they are capable of understanding. Kids want to (and need to!) explore the big questions of life.
Maybe someday I’ll write some fiction. That would explain my strange appetite to have this loaded into my subconscious. Fiction has always been a something I enjoyed and learned a lot from. After all, Fiction is one of the best places to find truths.