The J.K. Rowling Index

List of all J.K. Rowling's writings.

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Contribution: A love letter to Europe

Index ID: LLEU — Publication date: October 31st, 2019

Note: Contribution for the book "A love letter to Europe", published by Coronet Books.

The letter was written on thin, pale blue paper. The handwriting was neat and rounded. My brand-new German pen friend, Hanna, introduced herself in excellent English. Our schools had decided that Hanna and I would be a good fit as pen pals because we were both, not to put too fine a point on it, swots. In a matter of months, I’d be going to stay with her Stuttgart-based family for a week, and shortly after that, she’d come and stay on the Welsh border, with me. I was 13. The whole thing was thrilling.

Her house was warm, spotless and deliciously different. I remember ornamental candles, and rugs on a tiled floor, the furniture sleek and well-designed, and a shining upright piano in the corner, which Hanna, of course, played very well. On arrival, Hanna’s mother asked me what I wanted for breakfast, and when I didn’t immediately answer, she began listing all the foodstuffs she had available. Around about item six or seven, I recognised the German for cake, so I said, “Cake, please.”

Hanna’s mother was a magnificent cook. I particularly remember the clear soup with dumplings and the sausage with lentils, and every morning of my visit, presumably because she thought that’s what I was used to, she gave me cake for breakfast. It was glorious.

I kept in touch with Hanna for years, and when I was 15, the family invited me, with incredible generosity, to accompany them on a month-long trip to Italy. So, it was with Hanna and her family that I first saw the Mediterranean and first tasted shellfish.

I came home from Italy thirsty for more European adventures. I got myself a French pen pal called Adele, with whom in due course I went to stay in Brittany. There I watched her mother make crêpes, the region’s speciality, on the bilig, a large, circular griddle: they were the most delicious things I’d ever eaten, even including the Italian lobster. When out of sight of adults, I took advantage of the cheapness of French cigarettes and practised my nascent smoking habit, trying really hard to like Gitanes, and almost succeeding.

When I turned 16, my best friend and I cooked up the idea of going backpacking in Austria for a couple of weeks. Looking back, I do slightly wonder what our parents were thinking, letting us go: two schoolgirls with a smattering of German heading off on a coach with no fixed plans and no accommodation booked. We emerged from the experience unscathed: we successfully read the foreign train timetables, always managed to find accommodation, swam in ice-cold mountain lakes under brilliant sunlight and travelled from town to town as the fancy took us.

As I grew older, my determination to cross the Channel, even if alone or with insufficient funds, grew. If you had an Interrail ticket, surely one of the best inventions of all time, you could simply catch another train if you couldn’t find a room, or else doze in the station until the next one arrived. I took off alone at 19 to wander around France, a jaunt that ended abruptly with the theft of my wallet.

However, I was soon back again, because I spent a year in Paris as part of my French degree. My mother, a quiet Francophile with a half-French father, was delighted to visit me there; my father, possibly less so, given my perennially unsuccessful pleas to waiters to understand that bien cuit in his case meant there must be no pink at all in the middle of the steak.

I was 25 when my mother died, at which point I stopped pretending I wanted any kind of office job. Now I did what came most naturally: grabbed the dog-eared manuscript of the children’s book I’d been writing for a few months and took off across the Channel again. Disorientated with grief, I’d chosen one of the three teaching jobs offered to me almost at random. It was in Portugal, a country I didn’t know, and where I couldn’t speak a word of the language.

Teaching English abroad is a perfectly respectable profession, but nobody who has done it can deny that it attracts its fair share of misfits and runaways. I was both. Nevertheless, I fell in love with Porto and I love it still. I was enchanted by fado, the melancholy folk music that reflects the Portuguese themselves, who in my experience had a quietness and gentleness unique among Latin peoples I’d encountered so far. The city’s spectacular bridges, its vertiginous riverbanks, steep with ancient buildings, the old port houses, the wide squares: I was entranced by them all.

We all have shining memories of our youth, made poignant because they’re freighted with knowledge of what happened later to companions, and what lay ahead for ourselves. Back then we were allowed to roam freely across Europe in a way that shaped and enriched us, while benefiting from the longest uninterrupted spell of peace this continent has ever known. Lifelong friendships, love affairs and marriages could never have happened. Several children of my acquaintance, including my own eldest daughter, wouldn’t have been born without the frictionless travel the EU gave us.

At the time of writing, it’s uncertain whether the next generation will enjoy the freedoms we had. Those of us who know exactly how deep a loss that is, are experiencing a vicarious sense of bereavement, on top of our own dismay at the threatened rupture of old ties.

I think again of my teenage pen friend Hanna, as I reach for a quotation by Voltaire. She rarely let me get away with anything, so she’d probably have accused me of choosing a French philosopher in a spirit of pure provocation.

Well, Hanna was right about many things, but on this she’d be wrong. The truth is that I’m thinking of her now because she was my first friend from continental Europe, and because the words of Voltaire that hold so much meaning for me now are these: “L’amitié est la patrie.” “Where there is friendship, there is our homeland.” And Hanna, I really don’t want to lose my homeland.


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Letter to Australian production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child

Index ID: AUSCC — Publication date: February 24th, 2019

Note: J.K. Rowling wrote this letter to the Australian production of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child. She was not present when it was shared, but producer Sonia Friedman read it for the whole cast and crew. You can watch a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=grxXwNpZaq4

Dear everyone involved in Harry Potter and the Cursed Child in Melbourne,

Thank you for all your incredible work. Thank you to the company and creative team who’ve done such a magnificent job. John’s kept me up to date with everything that’s been going on-. And I swear, if I could Apparate, I’d be there on the opening night. One of these days I’ll turn up, I’m sure.

In the meantime, hugest congratulations on your opening at the Princess Theatre. My heart is in Oz tonight.

With love,

J.K. Rowling.


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On Writing

Index ID: OW — Publication date: January 6th, 2019

Q. Do you have tips for others trying to write?

A: I have to say that I can’t stand lists of ‘must do’s’, whether in life or in writing. Something rebels in me when I’m told what I have to do before I’m fifty, or have to buy this season, or have to write if I want to be a success.

Ten Habits All Best-Selling Writers Have In Common. These Five Tips Will Transform Your Writing! Follow J.K. Rowling’s Golden Rules For Success!

I haven’t got ten rules that guarantee success, although I promise I’d share them if I did. The truth is that I found success by stumbling off alone in a direction most people thought was a dead end, breaking all the 1990s shibboleths about children’s books in the process. Male protagonists are unfashionable. Boarding schools are anathema. No kids book should be longer than 45,000 words.

So forget the ‘must do’s’ and concentrate on the ‘you probably won’t get far withouts’, which are:

Reading

This is especially for younger writers. You can’t be a good writer without being a devoted reader. Reading is the best way of analysing what makes a good book. Notice what works and what doesn’t, what you enjoyed and why. At first you’ll probably imitate your favourite writers, but that’s a good way to learn. After a while, you’ll find your own distinctive voice.

Discipline

Moments of pure inspiration are glorious, but most of a writer’s life is, to adapt the old cliché, about perspiration rather than inspiration. Sometimes you have to write even when the muse isn’t cooperating.

Resilience and humility

These go hand-in-hand, because rejection and criticism are part of a writer’s life. Informed feedback is useful and necessary, but some of the greatest writers were rejected multiple times. Being able to pick yourself up and keep going is invaluable if you’re to survive your work being publicly assessed. The harshest critic is often inside your own head. These days I can usually calm that particular critic down by feeding her a biscuit and giving her a break, although in the early days I sometimes had to take a week off before she’d take a more kindly view of the work in progress. Part of the reason there were seven years between having the idea for Philosopher’s Stone and getting it published, was that I kept putting the manuscript away for months at a time, convinced it was rubbish.

Courage

Fear of failure is the saddest reason on earth not to do what you were meant to do. I finally found the courage to start submitting my first book to agents and publishers at a time when I felt a conspicuous failure. Only then did I decide that I was going to try this one thing that I always suspected I could do, and, if it didn’t work out, well, I’d faced worse and survived.

Ultimately, wouldn’t you rather be the person who actually finished the project you’re dreaming about, rather than the one who talks about ‘always having wanted to’?

Independence

By this, I mean resisting the pressure to think you have to follow all the Top Ten Tips religiously, which these days take the form not just of online lists, but of entire books promising to tell you how to write a bestseller/what you MUST do to be published/how to make a million dollars from writing.

I often recommend a website called Writer Beware (https://accrispin.blogspot.com) to new and aspiring writers. It’s a fantastic resource for anyone who’s trying to decide what might be useful, what’s worth paying for and what should be avoided at all costs. Unfortunately, there are all kinds of scams out there that didn’t exist when I started out, especially online.

Ultimately, in writing as in life, your job is to do the best you can, improving your own inherent limitations where possible, learning as much as you can and accepting that perfect works of art are only slightly less rare than perfect human beings. I’ve often taken comfort from Robert Benchley’s words: ‘It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up, because by that time I was too famous.’

 

Q. What do you love most about the writing life?

A: I can’t answer this without sounding melodramatic. The truth is that I can’t really separate a ‘writing life’ from ‘life.’ It’s more of a need than a love. I suppose I must spend most of my conscious life in fictional worlds, which some people may find sad, as though there must be something lacking in my external life. There really isn’t! I’m a happy person, by and large, with a family I adore and quite a few activities I enjoy. It’s just that I have other worlds in my head that I often slip in and out of and I don’t really know how it would feel to live any other way.

 

Q. What does it feel like having your work scrutinised? 

A: Having your work scrutinised is an inevitable concomitant of being a professional writer. I never dreamed that there would be a fandom the size of Harry Potter’s picking over the books. It’s staggering and wonderful. Given that I’m fairly obsessive myself, these are kindred spirits.

I could have spent literally every hour of every day discussing Potter characters, plot twists and theories with fans over the last ten years, but as I want to work on new things, I don’t give in to this temptation that frequently.

I miss the days when readings and events were slightly more low key.  I’m not complaining, but when audiences grow big you obviously can’t reach everyone who wants to ask you a question. Being able to engage with people on Twitter goes some way to solving this for me.  It’s astounding that people are still so interested in those books, and I doubt I’ll ever stop interacting as long as there are readers who know the world so well.

I’m in a new phase with the fandom right now, because I’m working within the wizarding world again, on Fantastic Beasts. Once again, I’m balancing wanting to interact with fans, with not being able to answer certain questions fully, because we’re only two films into a five film series. It’s a nice problem to have, though.


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Political Christmas Tale

Index ID: PCT — Publication date: December 22th, 2018

Note: It was published as a Twitter thread on J.K. Rowling's official account: https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1076458808703180800

And lo, unto her did appear a host of Corbyn defenders, who did descend upon her mentions, and she was not sore afraid, because she was used to it. And the host did sing with one voice, ‘ungodly woman, thou foolest us not. We know the true reason thou despisest Saint Jeremy.’ And she did say unto them ‘share thy hot take.’ And with righteous wrath they did declare, ‘thou fearest Saint Jeremy, friend of the poor, because he shall take from thee in taxation much more even than Herod, and so thou attackest the meek and honest saviour of this land.’ And she did reply, ‘I shall not call ye dimwits, for it is the season of goodwill, but tis not Saint Jeremy who shall tax me, nay, not even if he enters the house of Number Ten, for my tax rates are set by Queen Nicola, in whose kingdom I do abide, and unto her I do pay my full portion, seeking neither to flee to Monaco nor to hide my gold in far flung lands, like St Jacob, Patron Saint of Filthy Hypocrites.’ ‘Speak not of hypocrites!’ cried the host, ‘for thou dost claim to care about the poor yet doth rail against their champion, St Jeremy!’

And she did answer, ‘How shall the poor fare under Brexit, which thy Saint hath always in his secret heart desired, yet he hath not admitted what was in his heart, lest fewer attend his next Sermon on the Glastonbury B Stage.’ And they did answer, ‘Saint Jeremy will achieve a miracle, and he shall bring forth a Jobs First Brexit and all the land shall rejoice.’ And she did answer, ‘bollocks.’ But she bethought her of the season of goodwill, and repenting of her ire she did speak further. ‘I have, for all my life, voted Labour, yet now I cannot.’

‘But his goodness doth shine out of his every orifice!’ cried the host, swarming anew into her mentions. ‘Behold his beard! Look upon this picture of him being led off by police when he was protesting racism in all its forms!’ And she did say, ‘I have looked upon his beard and also upon this picture. It is a good picture and I do like a beard, as I have oft declared. Yet must I protest, thou it breaketh my heart so to do, that this party of Labour, which I have so long loved, has become, under St Jeremy -’

‘Speak not of the Jews!’ cried the host. ‘Why must thou speak so oft of the Jews?’ ‘Yea, I must speak,’ said she, ‘for when Jews no longer feel safe in Labour then I too must leave.’ And one of the host did shout something about the Rothschilds and he was hastily hushed by his brethren, who did declare, ‘he is not one of ours, thou he sports a #JC4PM halo.’ And another did speak and he said, ‘it is not antisemitic to criticise Israel,’ and she did put her face in her hands and want to weep.

But she did then look up and see many stars shining brightly in the sky and lo, they did arrange themselves before her eyes into a ‘who would make the best Prime Minister poll’ and she did cry, ‘Will ye not raise up your eyes to the Heavens? See there the People’s mind!’ And they did look up at the stars and read there that St Jeremy was, as for ages past, in third place after Pontus May and Don’t Know. And she spake further, ‘do ye not see that St Jeremy is hurting your party, yea, that his inability even to organise a vote of no confidence doth embolden and strengthen this calamitous government, of which all despair?’ But they did close their eyes to the stars and some did answer, ‘you are a fool who doth not understand St Jeremy’s master plan.’

And others still did beseech the woman to descend from the ivory tower in which, for the purposes of this story, they would wish her to dwell. And they besought her to descend into Bethlehem, and go to a certain allotment, where she would find the Messiah busy with his marrows and she would be filled with the spirit of Momentum. But she did shake her head and declare that she was and would remain an unbeliever, yet full sorrowful she was, for Labour had been her home. And the host did despise and condemn her, and many did tell her to fuck off and join the Tories, and before they did depart one of their number cried unto her, ‘it’s because he’ll tax you more, isn’t it,’ and she did sigh and wished him a Merry Christmas.


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Answers to Questions #3

Index ID: AQ3 — Publication date: November 12th, 2018

Q: Do you create as much detail beyond what we see in the Fantastic Beasts films as you did for the Harry Potter books?

A: Warner Bros had optioned the rights to the Fantastic Beasts years previously, so I knew that it might one day become a movie, but the only discussions we’d ever had about it were quite vague. I do remember thinking that if anything ever came of it, I’d have to make sure they got Newt Scamander right, because even though he never appeared except as a name within the Potter books, I knew a lot about him. He’d captured my imagination while I was writing his little book. I envisioned a doggedly different, awkward man who was at a loss with humans but phenomenally skilled with beasts.

As for Dumbledore and Grindelwald, I knew a huge amount more than ever appeared in the books, and this is my chance to show/tell some of it. Of course, in a film, one is revealing a story in a very different way than one does in a novel. Sometimes a single look does the job of three paragraphs. As readers of the original books will know, the pair of them don’t meet for a long time between their teenage interactions and their epoch-making confrontation in 1945. Nevertheless, we’ll be exploring their backstory in the films.

 

Q: What kinds of ‘beasts’ are we dealing with here – human or animal?

A: The idea of beasts works on several different levels within the movies. There’s the literal sense of non-human creatures: some of them cute, some of them terrifying, some simply strange. Then there is the metaphorical sense of the beast inside a man, the crude emotions that a manipulative genius like Grindelwald knows how to stoke and use. We’re also dealing with the idea of beastly people:  that some humans are something less than human.  Even where there is great charisma and intelligence, there may be an utter lack of conscience. Finally, I’m exploring the idea of creating beasts, which is to say, othering or dehumanising our fellow people, as the first step towards cruelty or extermination.

So through this beastly landscape walk our original four characters, led by the shambling figure of Newt Scamander, who loves the purity of creatures that the world might call monsters. The human world around Newt and his friends is becoming darker and more complex, and the original hunt for escaped creatures will become a hunt for something much more elusive and difficult: a return to humanity.


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Cover quote: Dear World

Index ID: CQDW — Publication date: October 16th, 2018

Note: Cover quote for "Dear World" by Bana Alabed.

A story of love and courage amid brutality and terror, this is the testimony of a child who has endured the unthinkable.


The following images are related to this writing


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Lethal White

Index ID: LW — Publication date: September 18th, 2018

Note: Published as Robert Galbraith.
Only the beginning of this text can be displayed here for research purposes. I apologize!

If only the swans would swim side by side on the dark green lake, this picture might turn out to be the crowning achievement of the wedding photographer’s career.


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Answers to Questions #2

Index ID: AQ2 — Publication date: September 1st, 2018

1. How do you manage two very different fictional worlds (Cormoran Strike and the Wizarding World) and two very different formats (books and screenplays)?

I’ve never had any problem moving between fictional worlds, even if I’m working on them simultaneously. There can be a lot of hanging around waiting for notes on the draft of a movie script, so I like to have a novel on the go in the background.

I envision the different fictional worlds as different rooms to which I have access. At worst, when entering one of the rooms, I have to spend a bit of time re-orientating myself, finding my bearings again, checking what I’ve put in which drawers. However, they’re discrete places in my head, and the moment I re-enter one of the worlds, the characters are as fully real to me as when I left them. Cormoran Strike has never reached for a magic wand, and Newt Scamander doesn’t limp or drink Doom Bar.

The difference between screenplays and novels is more challenging. It isn’t that one is intrinsically easier than the other, but that I’m far less used to writing the former, whereas novels and I are old friends.

2. What comes first, plot or character? 

I’m most interested in character, but plot usually comes first. I need to know the broad outline of the story before I start hatching characters. Having said that, a couple of stories have grown out of a single character. Character can be plot.

3. How do you come up with titles and how important are they?

Titles usually suggest themselves, but coming up with them always make me nervous. I think they’re quite important, which adds pressure. I have no idea what the third Beasts movie will be called, even though I already know the whole story. On the other hand, I already know the titles of the fifth Galbraith book and the children’s story I’m writing next.

4. Does the process of making film and TV put pressure on you to write faster, and do audiences’ reactions influence where you go with plot and how you develop characters? 

Fan reactions to Harry Potter were both exhilarating and overwhelming, often at the same time. I saw it as my job back then to make sure that I arrived at the ending I had planned for the series before the first book was even published. The final destination was hugely important to me, for reasons that were both personal and artistic, and I plotted a course towards it despite being subjected to a lot of (almost entirely good-natured) buffeting from readers.  Part of the fun of a series is the way people invest in the relationships from book to book (or film to film), and I love the fact that people have strong opinions on what should happen next. On the other hand, I never set pen to paper without knowing way more than will eventually appear on the page or screen, and I usually have a fairly strong idea of where I’m going, that won’t change.

In the case of the Beasts movies, I’m writing original screenplays, so there’s a practical need for the work to be done by a specific date so that filming can commence on time.

Where the Cormoran Strike novels are concerned, and even though I love the TV adaptations, I still finish the novel when it’s ready, no sooner! When I agreed to the books being adapted for TV I made it clear that the books would come as and when Robert Galbraith chose. Luckily, he loves writing them, so we should hopefully be seeing Strike on TV for some time to come.

5. Why choose Twitter rather than a well-placed press article or interview to make your opinions known?

Well, firstly that assumes that my main objective in tweeting is to ‘make my opinions known’ rather than what I think most people’s reason is for being on Twitter, which is to engage with other people, to debate and joke. I think for a lot of well-known people, it’s a bracing dose of normality.  Nobody’s shy about telling you you’re an idiot. Twitter’s a great leveller. It isn’t for everyone, but nearly all the writers I know love it, because they’re in their own medium.

There’s a time and a place for a press article, but tweeting is something that happens for me on writing breaks. At its best, it’s fun and fascinating. People in all their diversity and strangeness interest me more than anything else on the planet, and Twitter is as good a place as I’ve ever found for seeing human nature in the raw!


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