The J.K. Rowling Index

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

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A Good Scare

Index ID: GDSCR — Publication date: November 6th, 2000

Note: Published on Time Magazine.

I consciously wanted the first book to be fairly gentle-Harry is very protected when he enters the world. From the publication of Sorcerer’s Stone, I’ve had parents saying to me, “My six-year-old loves it,” and I’ve always had qualms about saying, “Oh, that’s great,” because I’ve always known what’s coming. So I have never said these are books for very young children.

If you’re choosing to write about evil, you really do have a moral obligation to show what that means. So you know what happened at the end of Book IV. I do think it’s shocking, but it had to be. It is not a gratuitous act on my part. We really are talking about someone who is incredibly power hungry. Racist, really. And what do those kinds of people do? They treat human life so lightly. I wanted to be accurate in that sense. My editor was shocked by the way the character was killed, which was very dismissive. That was entirely deliberate. That is how people die in those situations. It was just like, You’re in my way and you’re going to die. It’s the first time I cried during the writing of a book, because I didn’t want to kill him. It was the cruel-artist part of me who just knows that’s how it has to happen for the story. The cruel artist is stronger than the warm, fuzzy person.

My daughter has read all the books now, and I said to her about the ending of Goblet of Fire, “When you reach Chapter 30, Mommy’s going to read it to you, all right?” Because I thought, I’m going to have to hug her, and I’ve got to explain the stuff. And when the character did die, I looked at her to see if she was O.K., and she went, “Oh, it’s not Harry.” She didn’t give a damn. I was almost thinking, “Is this not scary at all?” She was just like, “Harry’s O.K., I’m O.K.” She’s a feisty little thing. In some ways, I think younger children tend to be more resilient. It’s kids who are slightly older who really get the scariness of it. Possibly because they have come across more intense stuff in their own lives.

Is evil attractive? Yes, I think that’s very true. Harry has seen the kind of people who are grouped around this very evil character. I think we’d all acknowledge that the bully in the playground is attractive. Because if you can be his friend, you are safe. This is just a pattern. Weaker people, I feel, want that reflected glory. I’m trying to explore that.

It’s great to hear feedback from the kids. Mostly they are really worried about Ron. As if I’m going to kill Harry’s best friend. What I find interesting is only once has anyone said to me, “Don’t kill Hermione,” and that was after a reading when I said no one’s ever worried about her. Another kid said, “Yeah, well, she’s bound to get through O.K.” They see her as someone who is not vulnerable, but I see her as someone who does have quite a lot of vulnerability in her personality. Hermione is me, near enough. A caricature of me when I was younger. I wasn’t that clever. But I was that annoying on occasion. Girls are very tolerant of her because she is not an uncommon female type-the little girl who feels plain and hugely compensates by working very hard and wanting to get everything just so.

I do have a real problem with gratuitous violence. Video games would be the area that most alarms me. That’s one thing that I’m not too keen to have wandering into my house without me really knowing what’s going on. My daughter doesn’t have a PlayStation at the moment. She is desperate for one. Particularly with younger children, I don’t like the idea that they’re going to be blowing people up, these little humanoids on the screen, with no thought of what this really means. And doing that for points. I think there is a vast difference between that and seeing a character you care about dying in a book, experiencing those emotions, working through things that we all have to face at some point.

I don’t think there’s any subject matter that can’t be explored in literature. Any subject matter at all. I really hate censorship. People have the right to decide what they want their children to read, but in my opinion they do not have the right to tell other people’s children what they should read.

One really great thing with my parents: nothing was off limits in my house. My mother was a huge reader, and I was allowed to read anything I wanted. There was never a sense that something might be a little too scary.


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Did they all think I was a scrounger or layabout?

Index ID: SCRLAY — Publication date: October 4th, 2000

Note: Published on The Sun.
Only the beginning of this text can be displayed here for research purposes. I apologize!

The words “penniless single mother” crop up a lot in newspaper stories about me.

“J K Rowling, once a penniless single mother scribbling away in a café…”, followed by the latest Harry Potter sales figures or film news.


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Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Index ID: HPGOF — Publication date: July 8th, 2000

Only the beginning of this text can be displayed here for research purposes. I apologize!

The villagers of Little Hangleton still called it ‘the Riddle House’, even though it had been many years since the Riddle family had lived there. It stood on a hill overlooking the village, some of its windows boarded, tiles missing from its roof, and ivy spreading unchecked over its face. Once a fine-looking manor, and easily the largest and grandest building for miles around, the Riddle House was now damp, derelict and unoccupied.


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Let me tell you a story

Index ID: LTS — Publication date: May 21st, 2000

Note: Published on Sunday Times. Also published on The Sunday Herald, on same date, titled "From Mr Darcy to Harry Potter... by way of Lolita".

I was a squat, bespectacled child who lived mainly in books and daydreams. I used to come out of the clouds periodically to invent games, bully my sister when she didn’t play them to my liking, and draw pictures – but mostly I read and, from quite an early age, wrote my own stories. There were always plenty of books in our house, because my mother was a passionate bibliophile.

I had huge difficulty selecting my favourite books; the list changes daily. It’s been a revealing exercise. Looking down my list, it struck me that all of my chosen stories are about love in some of its myriad forms: romantic, fraternal, perverse, unrequited, frustrated, self-sacrificing and destructive. The other thing that struck me was that three of my chosen passages feature large families or individual members of large families.

I have always been drawn to the idea of large families, even as a child; perhaps I wanted more siblings to boss around, or wanted to escape into a corner to daydream without being missed as easily. I’ve devoured biographies of the Kennedy and Mitford families for years, and one of my best friends is the oldest of 12, so I’m well aware that life in a large clan is not without its drawbacks. Nevertheless, the Harry Potter books were my chance to create my own, ideal big family, and my hero is never happier than when holidaying with the seven Weasleys.

The first of my chosen books is the famous story of the six Bastable children, who set out to restore the “fallen fortunes” of their house: The Story Of The Treasure Seekers by E Nesbit. I think I identify with E Nesbit more than any other writer. She said that, by some lucky chance, she remembered exactly how she felt and thought as a child, and I think you could make a good case, with this book as Exhibit A, for prohibition of all children’s literature by anyone who can not remember exactly how it felt to be a child. Nesbit churned out slight, conventional children’s stories for 20 years to support her family before producing The Treasure Seekers at the age of 40.

It is the voice of Oswald, the narrator, that makes the novel such a tour de force. I love his valiant attempts at humility while bursting with pride at his own ingenuity and integrity, his mixture of pomposity and naivete, his earnestness and his advice on writing a book. According to Oswald, a good way to finish a chapter is to say: “But that is another story.” He says he stole the trick from a writer called Kipling.

Escape from poverty forms the backdrop of my second chosen book, too, though this is not a childhood favourite, but a novel I read for the first time last year: I Capture The Castle by Dodi Smith. I was on tour in America last autumn, and after one mammoth signing a friendly bookseller handed me a copy and told me she knew I would love it. She was quite right. It immediately became one of my favourite novels of all time, and I was very annoyed that nobody had ever told me about it before.

Once again, it is the voice of the narrator, in this case 17-year- old Cassandra Mortmain, which makes a masterpiece out of an old plot. Cassandra, her older sister Rose and her younger brother Thomas are living in poverty even more abject than the Bastables, in a broken- down castle. Their father, the author of an experimental and mildly successful novel, has since written nothing at all, and sits alone in a tower most of the time reading detective novels from the village library.

The shadowy presence of the depressed and apathetic Mortmain hangs over the castle, but it is the women who dominate the book. Clever, perceptive Cassandra, who tells the story through her journal; sulky, dissatisfied Rose, a beauty without Cassandra’s brains, whose only escape, as she sees it, is marriage to a rich man; and the immortal Topaz, their young and beautiful stepmother, a hippy well before her time, who enjoys naked hilltop dancing, baking and playing the lute.

THE question you are most frequently asked as an author is: “Where do you get your ideas from?” I find it very frustrating because, speaking personally, I haven’t got the faintest idea where my ideas come from, or how my imagination works. I’m just grateful that it does, because it gives me more entertainment than it gives anyone else.

My favourite writer of all time is Jane Austen. I’m excruciating company when watching a Jane Austen television or film adaptation because I writhe with irritation whenever I see a large, florid actor playing Mr Woodhouse – or Mr Darcy taking a gratuitous dip because apparently he isn’t sexy enough without a wet shirt. My attitude to Jane Austen is accurately summed up by that wonderful line from Cold Comfort Farm: “One of the disadvantages of almost universal education was that all kinds of people gained a familiarity with one’s favourite books. It gave one a curious feeling; like seeing a drunken stranger wrapped in one’s dressing gown.”

I re-read Austen’s novels in rotation – I’ve just started Mansfield Park again. I could have chosen any number of passages from each of her novels, but I finally settled on Emma, which is the most skilfully managed mystery I’ve ever read and has the merit of having a heroine who annoys me because she is in some ways so like me. I must have read it at least 20 times, always wondering how I could have missed the glaringly obvious fact that Frank Churchill and Jane Fairfax were engaged all along. But I did miss it, and I’ve yet to meet a person who didn’t, and I have never set up a surprise ending in a Harry Potter book without knowing I can never, and will never, do it anywhere near as well as Austen did in Emma.


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The Not Especially Fascinating Life So Far of J. K. Rowling

Index ID: FASCLIFE — Publication date: October, 1999

Note: It was written to be published on OKUK Books website, now discontinued.

I was born in Chipping Sodbury General Hospital, which I think is appropriate for someone who collects funny names. My sister, Di, was born just under two years later, and she was the person who suffered my first efforts at story-telling (I was much bigger than her and could hold her down). Rabbits loomed large in our early story-telling sessions; we badly wanted a rabbit.

Di can still remember me telling her a story in which she fell down a rabbit hole and was fed strawberries by the rabbit family inside it. Certainly the first story I ever wrote down (when I was five or six) was about a rabbit called Rabbit. He got the measles and was visited by his friends, including a giant bee called Miss Bee. And ever since Rabbit and Miss Bee, I have wanted to be a writer, though I rarely told anyone so. I was afraid they’d tell me I didn’t have a hope.

We moved house twice when I was growing up. The first move was from Yate (just outside Bristol) to Winterbourne (on the other side of Bristol). A gang of children including myself and my sister used to play together up and down our street in Winterbourne. Two of the gang members were a brother and sister whose surname was Potter. I always liked the name, but then I was always keener on my friends’ surnames than my own (‘Rowling’ is pronounced like ‘rolling’, which used to lead to annoying children’s jokes about rolling pins).

When I was nine we moved to Tutshill near Chepstow in the Forest of Dean. We were finally out in the countryside, which had always been my parents’ dream, both being Londoners, and my sister and I spent most of our times wandering unsupervised across fields and along the river Wye. The only fly in the ointment was the fact that I hated my new school. It was a very small, very old-fashioned place where the roll-top desks still had ink-wells. My new teacher, Mrs Morgan, scared the life out of me. She gave me an arithmetic test on the very first morning and after a huge effort I managed to get zero out of ten – I had never done fractions before. So she sat me in the row of desks on her far right. It took me a few days to realise I was in the ‘stupid’ row. Mrs Morgan positioned everyone in the class according to how clever she thought they were; the brightest sat on her left, and everyone she thought was dim sat on the right. I was as far right as you could get without sitting in the playground. By the end of the year, I had been promoted to second left – but at a cost. Mrs Morgan made me swap seats with my best friend, so that in one short walk across the room I became clever but unpopular.

From Tutshill Primary I went to Wyedean Comprehensive. I heard the same rumour about Wyedean that Harry hears from Dudley about Stonewall High (see page of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone). But it wasn’t true – at least, it never happened to me. I was quiet, freckly, short-sighted and rubbish at sports (I am the only person I know who managed to break their arm playing netball). My favourite subject by far was English, but I quite liked languages too. I used to tell my equally quiet and studious friends long serial stories at lunch-times. They usually involved us all doing heroic and daring deeds we certainly wouldn’t have done in real life; we were all too swotty. I did once have a fight with the toughest girl in my year, but I didn’t have a choice, she started hitting me and it was hit back or lie down and play dead. For a few days I was quite famous because she hadn’t managed to flatten me. The truth was that my locker was right behind me and held me up. I spent weeks afterwards peering nervously around corners in case she was waiting to ambush me.

I became less quiet as I got older. For one thing I started wearing contact lenses, which made me less scared of being hit in the face. I wrote a lot in my teens, but I never showed any of it to my friends, except for funny stories that again featured us all in thinly disguised characters. I was made Head Girl in my final year, and I can only think of two things I had to do; one was to show Lady Somebody around the school fair, and the other was give an assembly to the whole school. I decided to play them a record to cut down on the time I had to speak to them. The record was scratched and played the same line of the song over and over again until the Deputy Headmistress kicked it.

I went to Exeter University straight after school, where I studied French. This was a big mistake. I had listened too hard to my parents, who thought languages would lead to a great career as a bilingual secretary. Unfortunately I am one of the most disorganised people in the world and, as I later proved, the worst secretary ever. All I ever liked about working in offices was being able to type up stories on the computer when no-one was looking. I was never paying much attention in meetings because I was usually scribbling bits of my latest stories in the margins of the pad, or choosing excellent names for the characters. This is a problem when you are supposed to be taking the minutes of the meeting.

When I was twenty six I gave up on offices completely and went abroad to teach English as a Foreign Language. My students used to make jokes about my name; it was like being back in Winterbourne, except that the Portuguese children said ‘Rolling Stone’ instead of rolling pin. I loved teaching English, and as I worked afternoons and evenings, I had mornings free for writing. This was particularly good news as I had now started my third novel (the first two had been abandoned when I realised how very bad they were). The new book was about a boy who found out he was a wizard and was sent off to wizard school. When I came back from Portugal half a suitcase was full of papers covered with stories about Harry Potter. I came to live in Edinburgh with my very small daughter, and set myself a deadline; I would finish the Harry novel before starting work as a French teacher, and try to get it published.

It was a year after finishing the book before a publisher bought it. The moment when I found out that Harry would be published was one of the best of my life. By this time I was working as a French teacher and being serenaded down the corridors with the first line of the theme from Rawhide (‘Rolling, rolling, rolling, keep those wagons rolling…’). A few months after ‘Harry’ was taken for publication in Britain, an American publisher bought the rights for enough money to enable me to give up teaching and write full time – my life’s ambition.

And I’ve got a real rabbit now. She is large and black and scratches me ferociously every time I try and pick her up. Some things are best left in the imagination.


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The Daily Prophet Newsletter #4

Index ID: DP4 — Publication date: October 1st, 1999

Note: In the late 1990s, Bloomsbury created an Official Harry Potter Fan Club and invited children from Britain to join. There was never a United States chapter of the Club. One of the perks for joining the Club was several issues of The Daily Prophet, a three-page newsletter detailing goings-on in the wizarding world. Each of these newsletters bore the notice ©J.K.Rowling and, according to Bloomsbury, they were written by her. (The Harry Potter Lexicon)
Only the beginning of this text can be displayed here for research purposes. I apologize!

MINISTRY IMPOSES RESTRICTIONS

Minister for Magic, Cornelius Fudge, has announced Ministry plans to introduce new laws preventing witches and wizards celebrating Hallowe’en ‘too enthusiastically.’


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Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

Index ID: HPPOA — Publication date: July 8th, 1999

Only the beginning of this text can be displayed here for research purposes. I apologize!

Harry Potter was a highly unusual boy in many ways. For one thing, he hated the summer holidays more than any other time of year. For another, he really wanted to do his homework, but was forced to do it in secret, in the dead of night. And he also happened to be a wizard.


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