JK: I HAD MADE SUCH A MESS OF MY LIFE... I HAD TO WRITE HARRY
HER books are read the world over and spawned a globally successful film franchise.
But JK Rowling has said that the only reason she completed the first Harry Potter novel was because she had been making ‘such a mess of my life’.
The best-selling author, 55, who was a struggling single mother when she wrote the first book in the series, said she found self-belief in the fact she had nothing left to lose.
‘The thing that pushed me to complete the book and really to have belief was having made such a mess of my life generally,’ she said on Ken Bruce’s BBC Radio 2 show.
She added: ‘I do remember feeling, “Look, so you get turned down by every publisher in the country, what’s to lose now?”’
Miss Rowling, who penned much of Harry Potter And The Philosopher’s Stone in Edinburgh cafes, said she lost the fear of rejection and decided to plough on with her writing despite being initially turned down by a number of publishers.
She said: ‘What I did believe was, I came to a point where I thought, “This is a good story and I’m going to put everything into this and see what happens.” And I’d lost the fear of failing or rejecting that had probably hampered me a little bit early on in my writing.’
Despite having the idea for Harry Potter when she was 25, the author said she was ‘extraordinarily insecure’ and very rarely shared anything that she had written at that point in her life. She said: ‘I wrote some spoof things for friends to make them laugh, but I never shared anything that I’d written in earnest because I was quite insecure.
‘I still had this degree of belief in the story that quelled my doubts and made me keep working, difficult though it was at that time.’
She said she has ‘never been arrogant enough not to believe that I need feedback’ and found it ‘satisfying’ to get rejection letters when she wrote the Strike novels under pseudonym Robert Galbraith.
She explained: ‘The first three months I had, when no one knew it was me and I was Robert Galbraith, and Robert started to get letters and fan feedback was so genuine and so lovely.’
Miss Rowling gave a rare insight into her personal life as she picked songs that mean something to her and husband Neil Murray on the Tracks Of My Years segment of Bruce’s show. She chose Bill Withers’ Ain’t No Sunshine as her husband once told her the song reminds him of how he feels when she is away with work. She said: ‘Well, I think of all the love songs written, this might be my favourite. It’s such a beautiful, simple sentiment, but I have an additional reason for choosing it, which is that it took lockdown for my husband to say to me... ‘I was playing it in the kitchen while cooking something; he walked in, he said, “This always makes me think of you when you’re down in
London” and that was a very moving marital moment so now it has an extra layer of meaning for me.’
Miss Rowling, who is mother to children Mackenzie, 15, and David, 17, with her husband and Jessica, 27, from her previous marriage to Jorge Arantes, said she had enjoyed spending more time with her family during lockdown.
She added: ‘Well, I hope that all listeners have had the happy experience that I’ve had of it being quite a special time. We also have teenage kids and it’s been kind of wonderful to spend that extra time with them.’