Categoria: Livro 4

Seu momento mágico

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Newsweek, 30 June 2003.

J.K. Rowling has this thing she does where her head dips down an inch or two into her shoulders and her hands twist the air in front of her, as if she’s wringing agony out of the air itself. And that’s what she does when you ask her what she thinks of her new book, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.” “At the moment I’m at the stage when you can only see faults,” she says, her hands going in time with her voice. “I rang my sister and said, ‘The book’s dreadful, it’s just dreadful.’ She just laughed. I said, ‘This is not funny. It is not funny that the book’s dreadful.’ And she said, ‘You’ve said this on every single book.’ I said, ‘But this time I really, really mean it. It’s just dreadful.’ And she said, ‘Yep, you said that on every single book.’ So she was no help at all.” Not to pick a fight in the first paragraph or anything, but we’re with the sister all the way on this.
On the other hand, who wouldn’t second-guess themselves if their four previous novels about the world’s most famous boy wizard had sold more than 190 million copies worldwide in eight years and been translated into 55 languages? The last installment in the saga, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” sold 3 million copies the first weekend it was released in 2000, making it the fastest-selling book in history. The only book that stands a good chance of beating the record is “The Order of the Phoenix.” Amazon.com had more than a million pre-orders, and between midnight last Friday, when the book went on sale, and Monday, Barnes & Noble expected to sell a mil- lion copies.

When books did go on sale at 12:01 a.m. Saturday, bookstores reopened to thousands of costumed Harrys or just kids in pajamas who couldn’t wait an extra minute for their books. These scenes in bookstores were reminiscent of the midnight-madness sales for “Goblet of Fire” in 2000, but many of this year’s celebrations were much more elaborate. The Magic Tree Bookstore in Oak Park, Ill., talked the town into transforming an entire commercial block into the wizard street of Diagon Alley. Thousands of people turned out, including Bonnie and Vann Smith and their daughter, Bridget, 14, who came all the way from Mountain Home, Ark. Bridget said she’s read each of the four previous novels 11 times, and planned to read the new book to her parents on the drive home – “if I don’t finish it tonight.” In New York’s Times Square, people lined up around the block at Toys “R” Us to get a book, including Courtney Sadowsky, 28, of Howell, N.J., who said, “I already read the first Harry Potter book to my infant daughter of 7 months.” She plans to do the same with the rest of the series. Standing in a line around the block to buy a book at 2 a.m. is not everyone’s idea of quality time. Let’s hear it for Miami’s Books & Books: if you reserved a book, it promised doorstep delivery by dawn Saturday.

The week before “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix” went on sale was, if anything, even more frenzied. Bowing to Rowling’s wishes, her British and American publishers did their best to keep the book locked up until the sale date, so that not one child, and certainly not one critic, got hold of a copy ahead of anyone else. The immediate beneficiaries of this policy were English bookies, who ran odds on which character would die in the new book, with Hagrid the gamekeeper the favorite at 7-2, followed by Sirius Black at 4-1 and Professors McGonagall and Dumbledore at 5-1. All week long, lucky shoppers kept finding books that had mysteriously landed on store shelves – in a Wal-Mart in Canada, in a health-food store in Brooklyn. (Ours came from a public library.) Scholastic, which spent more than $US3 million promoting the new book, was so adamant about not revealing the contents to anyone before the debut date that the National Braille Press said it couldn’t get access to the manuscript to produce a Braille version before the weekend. Very few authors get that kind of support from their publishers. But with all of publishing in the doldrums for two years (even Scholastic laid off 4 percent of its staff recently), which publisher wouldn’t jump to accommodate the creator of “Harry Potter”?

Not that Rowling is a prima donna. She doesn’t even like to complain. Her life, she wants you to know, is well beyond OK: “Only someone whose been as broke as I was could appreciate how happy I am. I appreciate every day not having to worry about money.” The 37-year-old author’s got a new husband, Dr. Neil Murray, a general practitioner whom she met through mutual friends and married the day after Christmas in 2001. They have a new baby, David Gor – don Rowling Murray, born in March. And she’s going to guest-star on “The Simpsons” next fall. Three years ago the Queen of England made Rowling an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. (And as long as we’re talking about the queen, Rowling is reportedly the richer of the two, although she denies that’s she’s worth anywhere near the rumored $US468 million.) When she gave NEWSWEEK a rare interview at her home in Edinburgh (there’s another house in the Scottish countryside and another in London), she acted like a celebrity only once: she kept us waiting. But that was so she could feed the baby and put him down for a nap.

The happy-ending address of the real-life Cinderella – the single mother who nine years ago was scribbling away in Edinburgh coffee shops while her baby daughter slept – is a rambling two-story Victorian stone house with some faded hydrangeas beside the front stoop. It sits in a tree-lined upper-middle-class neighborhood full of doctors and lawyers and politicians, and it’s not, Rowling points out, in the poshest part of town. There’s a freestanding office on the property where two assistants handle the thousand pieces of mail she gets a week. Rowling herself spends at least one day a week answering letters. There are no fancy cars in the drive, unless you count her husband’s Mini Cooper (oddest piece of Rowling trivia: she doesn’t know how to drive). Her daughter, Jessica, from her first marriage, still attends a public school. The only piece of evidence that you’re anywhere near rich-and-famous territory is the lock on the gate. Butch, the resident Jack Russell terrier, is much too friendly to frighten intruders.

When Rowling does get David down for his nap and comes strolling across the gravel drive to the office, she seems tall and gangly in jeans and a red shirt and not shy so much as preoccupied. But when she sits down and begins to talk, she crafts every answer with a true storyteller’s knack for detail and narrative.

Right off, you can’t help asking if fame doesn’t have its price – doesn’t it get harder and harder just to go for a walk? “No, no,” she replies, slowly and evenly. “I can honestly say there is nowhere I would avoid.” But then her hands start doing that twisting thing on the table. “Well, that’s not true. There is one thing I would avoid: I no longer write in cafes, I can’t do that anymore. And I know people might think, ‘Well, very small price to pay.’ But to me it’s a real privation, because it was the way I worked best. Very occasionally, as a treat, I take my notebook and go off to places that I’m not known to write in, and I write there. Last year I thought I’d been very clever: I went to the National Portrait Gallery’s cafe. I thought, ‘Well, no one will care, obviously, because they’ll all be interested in what they’ve just seen.’ Two days later the Edinburgh Evening News printed, ‘J. K. Rowling spotted in the National Portrait Gallery Cafe writing away. Is this Book 5?” Yes, it was Book 5, but now I can’t write there, you bastards.” That concludes the complaining portion of the interview.

Rowling’s first four books came out one right after another with hardly a year apart. By the time the fourth appeared, the strain of the pace was beginning to show. “Goblet of Fire” was compulsively readable, like a 734-page action sequence, but the writing was much sloppier than the prose in the earlier installments. “Order of the Phoenix,” in contrast, never goes out of control. She tells her story with her characteristic gift for pacing and surprise. Everything we’ve taken for granted – starting with the absolute power of Dumbledore, Harry’s headmaster at Hogwarts – is called into question. And that makes things much more frightening, both for Harry and for the reader, as evil Lord Voldemort consolidates his power, infecting even the Ministry of Magic with his malign designs.

“Phoenix” is the most atmospheric of all the Potter books. And since it seems that Edinburgh has a castle on every corner, you wonder how much Rowling has drawn on her surroundings. Not in the slightest, she claims. “I could live anywhere and produce it word for word the same. But I do think being British is very important. Because we do have a motley, mongrel folklore here, and I was interested in it and collected it. And then got the idea for Harry.”

Rowling makes no apology for having kept her readers waiting. “I wanted to know what it was like to write without having the pressure of the deadline. And it was wonderful. I had been writing very intensely, since ‘Philosopher’s Stone’ [the first book]. By ‘Goblet,’ I was writing 10 hours a day. And that’s just getting stupid. Because I have a daughter. I really wanted to see her before she turned 18 and left home and never spoke to me.” The extra time paid off in a very long, but never windy, chronicle where every page produces examples of Rowling’s astonishing inventiveness. Best new touch? A quill pen that Harry is forced to use in detention. As he writes “I must not tell lies,” the words are carved into the back of his hand. “Phoenix” is one of the best books in the series. How good is it? I peeked ahead to find out how it ended. So sue me. I peeked ahead in “Bleak House,” too. Only a really good book can make you do that.

Yes, a major character dies, but no giving away the ending here. In place of a spoiler, let’s pause for a message from the author: “I know that a certain number of my fans are going to be pretty upset with me by the end of the book. I really apologize to them. But it had to be so. And I am sorry because I know what it’s like to lose someone, albeit a fictional person, that you were quite attached to.” And yes, the plot gets darker in “Phoenix,” a point Rowling thinks is so obvious by now it’s hardly worth mentioning. “I’m surprised that people are surprised that the series is getting darker, because the first book started with a murder. And although you didn’t see the murder happen, that for me was an announcement that these things would continue within the series.” But she’s not blind to the fact that very young children will want to read these books, and that they will be disturbed: “I was always ambivalent when people told me that they’d read the first book to their 6-year-old, because I knew what was coming. And I have to say even with the first book, that is a scary ending.”

Perhaps the biggest surprise in “Phoenix” is that Harry, now 15, is finally acting like a moody, misunderstood teenager. “I’ve said all along that I want Harry to grow up in a realistic way, which means hormonal impulses, and it means a whole bunch of adolescent angst and anger, actually. Harry’s a lot more angry in Book 5, which I think is entirely right, given what he’s been through. It’s about time he got angry about how life has dealt him.” But isn’t it inappropriate for a 9-year-old to read about those things? “I don’t think so. They will be 14 themselves. There is no harm in them knowing what 14-year-olds may sometimes feel like. My daughter is 9, and I know that she can cope with Book 5 because I’m reading it to her at the moment. She’s coping.” She’s also, to her mother’s mild dismay, begun dictating plot points. “She’s told me unequivocally who I’m not to kill. And I’ve said, ‘Well, I already know who’s going to die, so now is not the time to come to me and tell me I mustn’t kill X, Y and Zed, because their fates are now preordained.’ And she doesn’t like hearing that at all. Not at all.”

Few authors are so passionately protective of their creations as Rowling, so it’s fun to listen to her put a subtle but very diplomatic distance between her work and the two movies derived from it so far. She likes the looks of the movies: “Chris Columbus [director of the first two films] was eager for me to tell him exactly what I saw in terms of sets particularly. And when I walked into the Great Hall of Hogwarts where they’d built it on a studio set outside London, that was absolutely like walking into the inside of my own head.” She was crazy about the scenes of Quidditch: “Quidditch really lived up to my expectations. That was phenomenal.” And she’s wild about Alfonso Cuaron, who’s directing the third movie, “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.” Rowling points out that one of the reasons she sold film rights to Warner Bros. was that they’d done such a good job with “The Little Princess,” a Cuaron film. But that, she implies, is quite enough gushing for one day, because the next thing she says is, “Obviously, I prefer books. I’m a writer. That’s always going to be so. The thing about film is that everyone sees the – same thing, and that’s what will always make it substandard to the novel. Readers have to work with me to create a new Hogwarts every single time every book is read.”

When it comes to the merchandising of Harry Potter, however – the action figures, robes and vibrating broomsticks – Rowling makes it plain that she never set out to write “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Commerce.” There have been moments, she admits, “where I regretted selling film rights. Just moments.” While Warner Bros. has given her a lot of say in the way the stories are developed for film, “the one thing that I did not have the power to do was say no to merchandising. And I would have done if I could have. But you have to be realistic about this. These are very, very expensive films to make. And no film company in the world is going to make them faithfully to the books and not merchandise because they’ve got to get their money back somehow.”

Of course, it’s tough to imagine anyone in the Potter universe not making his money back. When you ask her to explain the popularity of her books, she wisely says she has no clue and advises you to go ask her readers. But she certainly knows who she is and what she wants from life. Toward the end of the interview, her face takes on that preoccupied look again, and her answers dwindle down to yeses and nos. But then her husband brings the baby over to the office for a visit, and she lights right up. Watching her cuddle her newborn, you remember what she’d said when asked if there were any parallels between having a baby and producing a book. “Yes, there are parallels,” she replied. “The difference is that I just look at David and think that he’s absolutely perfect, whereas you look at the finished book and you think, ‘Oh, damn it, I should have changed that.’ You’re never happy. Whereas with a baby, you’re happy. If you’ve got a perfect baby, you’re just grateful.” Those of us under Harry Potter’s magic spell are more reluctant to criticize Rowling’s literary creation. But we know all about being grateful.

With Jac Chebatoris, Nayelli Gonzalez and Andrew Phillips in New York and Karen Springen in Chicago

©2003 Newsweek, Inc.

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Famosa autora corresponde-se com criança enferma

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Tradução: Pê Agá
Revisão: Adriana Snape

Grondahl, Paul. “Famous author corresponds with ailing child,” Albany Times Union, December 22, 2002

CLIFTON PARK, N.Y. — Once upon a time, a little girl who believed in magic fell in love with the Harry Potter books her mom read to her.

Her name was Catie Hoch. One day, doctors found a tumor in her kidney. She was 6. Neuroblastoma, an aggressive childhood cancer, quickly spread to her liver, lungs and spinal column.

Surgeons removed her kidney and adrenal gland, three-quarters of her liver and portions of her lungs. She endured seven rounds of high-dose chemotherapy, radiation and numerous clinical drug trials.

The sparkle drained from her blue eyes. She lost her curly blond hair. The treatments made her violently ill.

“She never complained or asked, “Why me?”‘ Catie’s mom said. “She was a ray of sunshine.”

Catie left her dad, two younger brothers and friends behind in their suburban Albany home when she and her mom moved to New York City while she received treatment at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center.

Catie rode the train to Penn Station dressed as Harry Potter. Sick, scared and living in a strange place, Catie took comfort in J.K. Rowling’s best-selling stories of good triumphing over evil.

She and her mom stayed at a Ronald McDonald House for 18 months, returning home for a visit every six weeks or so. They read all the Harry Potter books, one after the other.

They were nearing the end of the third book in the series, “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” when doctors said Catie was losing her fight with cancer.

Catie had a wish. She wanted to have her mother read her book four, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.” But Rowling was still writing it and the book wasn’t due out for many months. Catie did not have that long.

A friend of a friend sent an e-mail to Rowling’s publisher in England.

A short while later, an e-mail arrived.

“Dear Catie. I am working very hard on book four at the moment … on a bit that involves some new creatures Hagrid has brought along for the care of Magical Creatures classes. You are an extremely brave person and a true Gryffindor. With lots of love, J.K. Rowling (Jo to anybody in Gryffindor).”

Rowling sent Catie a plush stuffed owl named Pigwidgeon (a character in her book) for Valentine’s Day along with a card. Two weeks after Valentine’s Day, Rowling wrote again.

Catie dictated her replies to her mom, who typed them into their home computer and sent them to the author by e-mail. Mostly, Catie talked about the intricacies of the Harry Potter plot, her family and friends. And Rowling replied.

“I love you even more for telling me to make book four long, because I am worried about how long it’s getting. You’ve cheered me up a lot. Lots of love. Your friend right back. Jo XXX”

Catie defied doctors’ predictions and made it through her March birthday. She received a card and presents from Rowling, a plush cat and a dream decoder book.

Spring arrived, and Catie lapsed into a coma. When she awoke, she asked her mom to invite several of her girlfriends. Catie gave her American Girl dolls to her friends.

The end was near. Catie’s mom relayed this information to Rowling in an e-mail.

A phone call came to the Hochs’ Clifton Park home from Edinburgh, Scotland, on a Sunday afternoon. It was Rowling. She wanted to read parts of book four to Catie.

“We laid Catie down on the living room couch, and Jo read to her over the phone. Catie’s face just lit up,” her mom recalled.

Rowling called three or four more times to read to her, but Catie started failing so badly she couldn’t receive any more calls.

Catie died May 18, 2000. She was 9.

Three days later, Rowling wrote a message of condolence.

“Dear Gina and Larry. I have been away again. I’ve only just received your message. I have been praying that Catie would be released, that she would go where she can wait happily and painlessly for the rest of us to join her. But there are no words to express how sorry I am.

“I consider myself privileged to have had contact with Catie. I can only aspire to being the sort of parent both of you have been to Catie during her illness. I am crying so hard as I type. She left footprints on my heart all right. With much love, Jo”

Rowling continued to write to Catie’s family in the ensuing weeks and shared in their feelings of grief and loss.

“I look back at Catie’s e-mails to me and happiness shines out of each and every one. Please don’t thank me for anything I did, because I feel truly honoured to have known your daughter, however briefly. Jo XXX”

Catie’s parents … Gina Peca, a homemaker, and Larry Hoch, a tax lawyer for General Electric Co. … established a nonprofit public charity in Catie’s memory.

The Catie Hoch Foundation raised $120,000 in two years and made gifts to Sloan-Kettering and to Ronald McDonald houses in New York, Boston and Albany to help children with neuroblastoma, the third most common form of pediatric cancer.

The foundation recently received a surprise, unsolicited donation of $100,000 from Scotland. It game from J.K. Rowling. And Catie’s mother told her story.

On the Web: http://www.catiehochfoundation.org.

Copyright (c) 2002, The Associated Press

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J.K. Rowling tem o futuro traçado por Harry Potter

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Traduzida: .marceLo
Revisada: {patylda}
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Thomas, Sherry. “Chapter and Verse: J.K. Rowling has the future mapped out for Harry Potter, Houston Chronicle, OCTOBER, 2000

J.K. Rowling knows how her best-selling Harry Potter series will end. Yes, it will be dark. No, she’s not saying whether Harry lives or dies. Let her finish book five first.

“The final chapter of book seven is written,” the British author told reporters Thursday in a teleconference. “You will find out what happens to the survivors.”

One character has already fallen in Rowling’s weighty fourth tome, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. Will there be more deaths in the wizard world? Moreover, will her readers be able to handle it?

“I feel that the ending of book four is frightening, but there are reasons for that. I was dealing with an evil character,” Rowling explained. “I do not see, in five, six and seven, that I have to, kind of, up the stakes with every book at all. I wouldn’t necessarily say that five is going to be darker. But I couldn’t promise that there isn’t more sad stuff coming.”

While book five is “under way,” Rowling doesn’t expect to finish it in time for a summer 2001 release. What Potter fans can look forward to is the March release of two, very short Harry Potter “reference” books. As part of a charity project with London writer Richard Curtis (of Notting Hill and Four Weddings and a Funeral fame), Rowling has written and illustrated books that have appeared in the Harry Potter series over the years — Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them and Quidditch Through the Ages.

Meanwhile, Goblet of Fire and the other Harry Potter books — Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets and Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban — continue to spark controversy among some religious groups, who oppose the references to magic and witchcraft. Harry Potter even made the banned-books list.

“It’s a short-sighted thing. It is very hard to portray goodness without showing what the reverse is. That’s always been my feeling about literature,” Rowling said. “You find magic, witchcraft and all those things throughout children’s literature. Are you going to stop The Wizard of Oz? Are you going to stop C.S. Lewis? At what point are you going to say these are dangerous and damaging?”

Ask the folks in Santa Fe, where a proposal by a school board member aims to remove several books — including the Potter books — from the local elementary school library. That school board was to consider the book ban at a meeting Thursday night.

“I personally think they’re very mistaken,” Rowling said of the proposal. “What scares me is these people are trying to protect children from their own imagination.”

Perhaps it’s the overprotective nature of parents. But perhaps, Rowling suggested, it’s the perpetual problem in today’s society of not trusting children to think for themselves.

“It’s my profound belief that there’s a tendency to underestimate children on all sorts of levels.”

Rowling said that’s why she was so annoyed when the New York Times decided to end Harry Potter’s domination of its best-seller list earlier this summer by relegating it to a newly created “children’s fiction” list.

“I was a bit sad, to see that children’s literature isn’t important. I find that slightly depressing,” she said. “You will see children’s book reviews getting very little space in newspapers, but you’ll see, in the same newspapers, stories about literacy for children.”

Rowling does admit that the Harry Potter series was never meant for very young readers.

“From the very first book, I would meet parents who would say my 5- or 6-year-old loves it, and that worried me, because I knew what was coming,” she said. “Eight or 9 is the youngest I would recommend as a reading age for the book.”

But even Rowling may have underestimated a child’s tolerance of fear. Her own daughter, 7-year-old Jessica, insisted on reading the 732-page Goblet of Fire with no help from Mum.

“She read book four entirely to herself, but I told her when she hit Chapter 30, I wanted to read it to her and talk her through the ending,” she said.

Rowling was expecting a tearful response to a popular character’s death.

“I looked up at her, expecting her to be really upset. But she said, `Ah, it’s not Harry. Who cares?’ ” Rowling said.

These days, Rowling’s attentions are divided between the publicity of the series and her effort to finish book five and make it the best it can be.

Never mind that Amazon.com in the United Kingdom is already taking advance orders. Never mind that American director Chris Columbus is nearly ready to start production on the film version of the first Harry Potter book.

Rowling, a natural stoic, said she has total “blockage power.” She said when it comes to Harry and the gang, she has a one-track mind not easily swayed by hype or public opinion.

“I’m really still loving the writing,” she said. “My Holy Grail is to end the seven-book series and know I was really true to what I wanted to write.”

Earlier this month, Rowling signed on as an ambassador for Britain’s National Council for One-Parent Families. She has also donated 500,000 pounds (nearly $1 million in U.S. dollars) to the cause. Not because she’s now considered “the richest woman in Britain,” but because she feels responsible to speak out on behalf of single parents.

During her brief reliance on the “dole” (British public assistance), Rowling said her eyes were opened to the difficulties other single mothers faced.

“I used to wonder when I was in that situation why nobody was putting the facts out about how difficult that situation really was,” she said. “So when the council of single families approached me, I thought `OK, then it’s me. If no one else is going to say it, I will.’ ”

Noble a cause as it is, though, such commitments can be hefty to a woman with three books to finish. Much like the early days, when she was finishing her first two books with baby Jessica at her cafe table, Rowling’s elevation to world role model has placed more demands on her time.

“On an ideal day, I’ll probably write six to 10 hours,” Rowling said. “But I’m having time trouble. I still write longhand, and I still write away from the house. I use cafes like offices really, with the added bonus that someone is there to bring me coffee.”

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J.K. Rowling: a feiticeira por trás de Harry Potter

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Tradução: {patylda}
Revisão:

Boquet, Tim. “J.K. Rowling: The Wizard Behind Harry Potter,” Reader’s Digest, December 2000

Author J. K. Rowling explains the magic of the strange young boy who has cast a spell over publishing-and her life

“I can’t wait! I can’t wait,” cries ten-year-old Alula Greenberg-White, hugging herself in expectation. It’s 9am outside a large bookshop in north London and Alula is at the head of a queue of 100 excited children and parents. They peer through the windows at stacks of a 640-page novel, eyes searching for the small strawberry- blonde Pied Piper who has brought them here-and to bookshops round the globe-and who is somewhere inside nursing a coffee.
“I’m really not a morning person,” admits J. K. Rowling as she flexes her fingers in preparation for another marathon signing of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth volume of a publishing phenomenon.
Children in more than 30 countries are just wild about Harry, their bespectacled hero who discovers on his eleventh birthday that he is a wizard. For the few who don’t know: Harry inherited his magical powers from his parents who have been slaughtered by the evil wizard Lord Voldemort. Harry, who bears a lightning scar on his forehead, also the handiwork of Voldemort, then has a series of white-knuckle adventures at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry. This is housed in a remote Scottish castle, where mail is delivered to pupils by their owls.
Rowling has so enchanted children with her imagination and a vivid cast-redoubtable Hermione Granger and plucky Ron Weasley, Harry’s sidekicks, sinister Professor Snape and Hagrid, the endearing gamekeeper who likes a drink and has a passion for hatching dragons-that the first four stories in the series have taken up permanent residence at the top of the best-seller lists. To date, they have sold an astonishing 41 million copies.
On July 8, UK publication day of Goblet of Fire, an astonishing 372,775 hardback copies were sold. In the US-where Rowling is believed to be the first author ever to occupy the top three slots on The New York Times best-seller list at the same time-a nation of bleary-eyed children stayed up for the midnight launch to snaffle 3.8 million volumes.
In this digital age when it is said kids don’t give a fig for the printed word, Joanne Kathleen Rowling has turned more children on to reading than any living author. And with a film of the first book in production and a range of Harry merchandise ready to ride into the shops on its back, she has one of the highest profiles on the planet. Yet the reality is a softly spoken, bird-like 35-year-old, who shifts on the sofa as she considers the question: what is it about Harry that captivates in all languages and cultures? “Magic has a universal appeal. I don’t believe in it in the way that I describe in my books, but I’d love it to be real,” she says, picking up speed like the Hogwarts Express, which at the beginning of every term takes the children to school from platform nine and three-quarters at London’s King’s Cross station.
“The starting point for the whole of Harry’s world is ‘What if it were real?’ And I work from there.” She has never had a market in mind. “I started writing these books for me, but I really like my readers. They are very likeable people.” She glances at the queue outside, which must now be 300 strong. “Children are a writer’s dream. They are not interested in sales figures. They want to know why the plot works a certain way. They know the books back to front and talk about the characters as though they are living, mutual friends of ours.” They mirror Rowling’s own feelings perfectly.
But with its public school dorms and house points, isn’t it all just too British? “Wherever I go, children seem to like the Britishness of the stories, even if they are probably getting a very rosy picture of what school in Britain is like!”
J.K. Rowling: The Wizard Behind Harry Potter 2 Tim Bouquet

And they all know the Rowling story. She was born in 1965 in Chipping Sodbury, South Gloucestershire-an appropriate birthplace for someone who loves strange, but believable, names. Writing from the age of six and with two unpublished novels in the drawer, she was stuck on a train in 1990 when Harry walked into her mind, fully formed. She spent the next five years constructing the plots of seven books, one for every year of his secondary school life.
Rowling says she started writing the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, in Portugal, where she was teaching English and had married journalist Jorge Arantes. The marriage lasted just over a year, but produced baby Jessica.
Leaving Portugal, she arrived in Edinburgh in 1993 to stay with her younger sister Di, a lawyer, with just enough money for a deposit on a flat and some baby equipment. “I was depressed and angry. Angry that I had messed up my life and let my daughter down.” She went to visit a friend of her sister’s who had a baby boy. “His room was full of toys. Jessica’s toys fitted into a shoebox. I came home and cried my eyes out.”
The tears did not last. Harry’s bravery strikes a chord with children because he is full of anxieties but gets by on luck and nerve. Rowling agrees she is much the same. “It’s not pure luck,” she explains. “He has the will to get through and I never lost that. When you are really on your uppers, you don’t sit there and cry, you try and get out of it.” However, stories of an impoverished single mother living in a rat-infested bedsit and scribbling her way to wealth in an Edinburgh coffee shop are journalistic inventions. “I am a single mum, I did, and still do, write in cafes and I was broke,” says Rowling, who recently gave £500,000 to the National Council for One Parent Families and became the charity’s first-ever ambassador. “Those early stories neglected to mention that I come from a middle-class background, I have a degree in French and Classics and that working as a supply teacher was my intended bridge out of poverty.” And the bedsit? It was a mouse-infested two-bedroom flat. At first nobody wanted to publish Harry Potter. “The fact that it was set in a boarding school was very un-PC as far as most publishers were concerned,” Joanne explains. She was told that the plot, like her sentence construction, was too complex and too long. “That unnerved me because I knew it was going to be the shortest book of the series!” Refusing to compromise, she at last found a publisher, Bloomsbury, and, armed with an £8,000 grant from the Scottish Arts Council, ploughed into book two, Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets.
In 1997 she received her first royalty cheque for Philosopher’s Stone. Until then Rowling was “a happily obscure person”. By book three the world, fuelled by word of mouth and some astute marketing, went crazy for Harry, slapping a row of noughts on Rowling’s bank balance and turning her life upside down. Day and night she had journalists knocking on the unanswered door of her flat. Success, it was reported, had turned J. K. Rowling into a paranoid recluse. As ever, the truth is prosaic. Joanne does get out, but writing four books back to back has been totally time-consuming, especially when a massive flaw in the plot of Goblet of Fire took three months to fix, delaying delivery of the manuscript. “I am not an editor’s dream!” she laughs.
J.K. Rowling: The Wizard Behind Harry Potter 3 Tim Bouquet

She claims never to read what is written about her and is fiercely protective of Jessica, now seven. On her first day at primary school, excited 10 and 11-year-olds surrounded Jessica, clamouring to know about Harry and his creator. “At first Jessica liked it-she’s a feisty little thing.” But when the attention didn’t ease off, Rowling went into school and asked the older children: “Could you lay off a bit? She’s very young and she can’t answer your questions because she hasn’t read the books.” In return, she did a reading and a question-and-answer session with the two top classes. “It was fun and solved the problem.” Jessica is now a fully-fledged Potter fan, but like every other child she has to wait for publication day to find out what Harry does next. A broomstick’s hop away from the bookshop, Annie Williams, deputy head of Christ Church Primary School in down-at-heel Camden, swears by Harry. “When I read the Philosopher’s Stone to a class of 11-year-olds, ten of whom have special needs,
they were so inspired that I prepared worksheets based on the book to help them with grammar.” Soon they were writing newspaper articles about the story, and postcards from Hogwarts. “Their written work has improved dramatically.”
So what has Rowling got that other writers haven’t? “Potions, intrigue, magic and ‘what happens next’,” says Williams. “The same formula Shakespeare used.” Rowling may write about wizards, ghosts, elves and the hippogriff, which is half-horse, half-eagle, but her books are driven with all the suspense and twists of detective novels. Perhaps that’s why Harry is also hugely popular with adults. Stories of parents muscling in to read each new volume ahead of their children are common.
“I love a good whodunnit and my passion is plot construction. Readers loved to be tricked, but not conned,” Rowling says, warming to her theme. “The best twist ever in literature is in Jane Austen’s Emma. To me she is the target of perfection at which we shoot in vain.”
J.K. Rowling: The Wizard Behind Harry Potter 4 Tim Bouquet

The Harry Potter film is being directed by Chris Columbus, who worked on Home Alone and Mrs Doubtfire, and has a predominantly British cast, much to Rowling’s relief.
“When I first met screenwriter Steve Kloves (who wrote and directed The Fabulous Baker Boys) the fact that he was American made me spiky and I felt he was going to mutilate my baby. But as soon as he said his favourite character was Hermione I melted, because she is very close to me. I was very like her at that age.” Kloves loves Rowling’s characters just the way they are. “From the first page she had me. There’s a genuine edge and darkness to her books. One reason they’re so popular with children is that there’s no pandering whatsoever.” While the death of a well-loved character in book four is upsetting, Rowling believes that it is only by letting children experience the real consequences of evil actions that they can understand Harry’s moral choices. The actor to play Harry was not cast for months. More than 40,000 young hopefuls put their names into the hat to star as the world’s most famous wizard. But when Rowling saw young British actor Daniel Radcliffe’s screen test, she knew the 11-year-old was perfect for the part. Rowling’s quality control is legendary, as is her obsession with accuracy. She’s thrilled with Stephen Fry’s taped version of the books, outraged that an Italian dust jacket shows Harry minus his glasses. “Don’t they understand that they are the clue to his vulnerability?” One person who is not there to see and share her success is her half-Scottish, half-French mother who died of multiple sclerosis in 1990, aged just 45. She had no idea that Joanne had started writing about Harry Potter.
In a moving scene in Philosopher’s Stone, Harry stares into a magic mirror that can let him see what he most craves in life. In it he sees his dead parents seemingly alive. It is a rare autobiographical insight into Rowling’s feelings about her own loss. “I miss her daily,” she says. “I still hear her voice. It’s very painful…” For the first time she stutters to a halt and stares at the floor as though searching for a lost thread.
“My father, a retired aircraft engineer, is immensely proud,” she says. “He would have been proud whatever I’d succeeded at. But books were my mother’s big passion. Having a daughter who was a writer would have been a very big deal, even if I’d only sold three copies.” She’s sold a few more than that, but this unpretentious woman with the loud percussive laugh has only recently learned to admit that she enjoys being rich-she is rumoured to be worth around £20 million. “I bought a house in London; that’s pretty extravagant! The biggest luxury is that it stops you worrying. Not a day goes by when I’m not thankful for that.”
J.K. Rowling: The Wizard Behind Harry Potter 5 Tim Bouquet

Back in the London bookshop the doors burst open. Camera flashguns blaze. Faster than a game of Quidditch, the aerobatic broomstick-basketball at which Harry excels, the roped-off route to the signing table is twitching with small trainers. How does Rowling view life after Harry? “I never forget A. A. Milne,” she says, pen in hand. “When he wrote for adults every review he ever got referred to Pooh, Tigger and Piglet. What appeals to me is sending in manuscripts for other books under a pseudonym. Anonymity was a nice place to be.” But when she sees ten-year-old Alula’s smiling face she relaxes visibly, happy to be popular children’s author J. K. Rowling. “Hi, how are you?” she asks, as though greeting a long-lost friend. In seconds the two of them are huddled, in cahoots about the latest adventures of the boy wizard. Afterwards, as her mother joins other parents at the till, Alula says her heroine has surpassed her expectations. “She’s so friendly and she answered all my questions!” For Alula, a Harry Potter book can never be too long. While others try to fathom Rowling’s success, this ten-year-old knows why the magic works. “Because it’s exciting.” Spills and spells. It really is that simple.

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Pottermania em Vancouver

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Tradução: Sarah Lee
Revisão: Adriana Snape
*OK Categorias e Conteúdo

Garcia, Frank. “Harry Pottermania in Vancouver, with J.K. Rowling: At the author’s press conference, adults take a back seat to kids,” Cinescape, 16 November 2000

At a J.K. Rowling press conference, it’s the adults who take a backseat to the children sitting in the front row. Almost half a dozen boys and girls who are playing reporter clutch their pens and pads, asking questions to their favorite children’s author about her phenomenal ‘Harry Potter’ book series. At times, adults listening intently to the children’s questions seemed bemused by their ability to play in the same sandbox. In the room are veteran reporters from local newspapers and television stations. One television news reporter, a mother herself, grins throughout the ‘young adults’ portion of the press conference as she points her camera’s boom mike to a young girl in the front row asking questions. Indeed, at the end of the conference, a few interviews were given by the kids to the News Hour reporter, discussing their love for Harry Potter.

On Oct. 25, 2000, just prior to two scheduled appearances as part of the Vancouver Writers and Readers Festival event, J.K. Rowling met with reporters to discuss her book tour. Just 24 hours earlier, she read a chapter of her fourth book to an estimated 12,000 fans at Toronto’s Skydome stadium, which is believed to be the largest author reading event ever.

‘I think that a reading still can be a very intimate experience, even if a lot of people are there,’ said Rowling. ‘However, undeniably, I can’t have as much one-to-one contact. It’s a battle for me. My post bag, as you can imagine, is full with thousands of requests to do readings at bookstores, signings at small bookstores and to visit at schools individually. And I used to do that. It was the most fun I had apart from the writing.

‘But if I did do that now, I would never see my daughter. I would never write another book. I would never eat or sleep. So I have to cut my cloth. I can say, ‘Well, I won’t read any more,’ which I would really miss. Or I could do bigger readings where I reach more people at once and that’s the way I’ve chosen to go.

‘Next year, I probably won’t do any readings,’ continued Rowling, who adds that charity readings will be her single exception. ‘I just want to do writing, so the Skydome is one big bang; do one big reading and then we’ll take a break for a while because I need to do writing. I want to be writing. So basically I’m coming to the end of two weeks of exposure to the outer reaches of the madness. Then, I’ll go home and life will be normal again!’

Statistically speaking, the Harry Potter phenomenon has been the magical publishing story of the year. Newsweek magazine estimates that with just four of seven books in the series published so far, there are 35 million copies in print, with translations in 40 languages. Conservatively, it’s estimated that the books have sold $480 million in three years. Forbes magazine ranks Rowling at number 25 in a list of the most powerful celebrities. That’s a heady achievement for a woman who conjured up a magical universe while she was on welfare.

‘I thought I’d written something that maybe a handful of people would like, so this has been something of a shock, to say the least!’ said Rowling as she sat at the front table of the room, facing her captive audience at the conference. ‘For myself, the height of my ambition was someday I could sign a check in a shop and someone would say, ‘Oh, you wrote my favorite book!’ That they would recognize my name, not that I ever expected to be physically recognized, of course. As a matter of fact, that did happen to me! [The clerk] said to me, ‘Are you the Joanne Rowling?’ and I went the color of my shirt. That was great.’

Although the Harry Potter book series is marketed as children’s books, many adults like them, too. But ultimately, Rowling is writing for herself. ‘I get asked, ‘Who do you have in mind when you write?’’ said Rowling. ‘’Is it your daughter or is it children you’ve met?’ No, it’s just me. I’m very selfish. I just write for me. So the humor in the books is what I find funny. On that level, I’m not surprised that adults share my humor. I didn’t expect what has happened, so I’m constantly surprised.’

And because she is writing for herself, Rowling explains that she is ruthlessly stringent about keeping the stories’ plotting on track as initially mapped out. ‘The one thing that keeps me on course, above all others, is that I want to finish these seven books and look back and think that whatever happened, however much this hurricane whirled around me, I stayed true to what I wanted to write. This is my Holy Grail; that when I finish writing book seven, I can say, hand on my heart, ‘I didn’t change a thing. I wrote this story I meant to write. If I lost readers along the way, well, so be it. But I still told my story. The one I wanted to write.’

‘That, without wishing to sound too corny, is what I owe to my characters, that we don’t get deflected by either adoration or criticism. I think it would be dangerous to start playing to the gallery. I don’t think it wise to listen too much either to compliments or criticism. Having said that, after the writing, which is easily my favorite thing, the reason I keep coming out and doing this stuff is to reach readers. I think I have the most likeable readership in the world. They are very nice people.’

However, her writing process isn’t so set that there’s no room for flexibility—or fun. ‘The books aren’t so planned in meticulous details that I can’t have fun while writing,’ said Rowling. ‘I invent stuff as I go. A lot of magical creatures and objects get invented while I’m writing a book. But what’s planned is the skeleton of the plot. I deviate slightly, but I have to get from point A to point B because obviously, I can’t do C, D, E, F [with doing that first].’

Meeting and greeting people in her travels has provided Rowling with many adventures. Rowling said books signings are ‘a bottomless pit. You start signing, you won’t finish!’ If there’s one thing about the entire Harry Potter phenomenon that surprises her the most, it’s quite probably this: ‘I’ve never had a rude child, which to me, is incredible. Never once has one throw a tantrum. I’ve never had a child ask for more than I can give. Never once have I had a child [for] which I didn’t feel anything but affection. Thousands of them.’

Alas, adults are a different story. ‘In the last tour, in the U.K., I finally lost my temper,’ grinned Rowling. ‘And I have a fairly long fuse for my readers, but halfway down a queue of about 1,000 people, I had to make a train. This was a train to see my daughter, so this was not a thing I wanted to miss. Halfway down the line, I’ve got this guy with every bit of Harry Potter paraphernalia he could get his paws on and he wanted them all personalized. And I said to him, ‘If I do this for you, that means 12 children at the end of this queue won’t get their books signed.’ And he argued, and I lost my temper. But eBay, ya know? eBay [and being able to auction this signed paraphernalia off] explains a lot of it.’

The most frequently asked question she gets from adults, said Rowling, is ‘’What’s the secret? What’s the formula?’ I never analyze it. I think it would be dangerous for me to start analyzing it in that way. Number one, it would stop being fun. Number two, I’m not sure I know. The correct people to ask are the readers.’

Deep and obscure questions occasionally appear from unlikely quarters. ‘I got asked in New York, ‘How does the Wizard economy work?’ Now, in fact, I know how it works, but no one had bothered to ask me that ever before, so that was very satisfying to have the chance to explain. Predictably, a Wall Street journalist actually asked me that!’

A more common topic that everyone wants to know about, but few people have any real answers for, is, ‘How do you deal with sudden fame?’ ‘I’m still learning,’ replied Rowling. ‘I would definitely not say I’m on top of it. I would say for the first two years of being in the paper, I was in denial. I kept thinking ‘It will go away.’ And about [the time of ] the publishing of the third book, I had to accept it wasn’t going to go away any time soon. Which is a probably healthier place to be. It will go away. That’s the nature of the game and I truly believe I will be happy. And I will have fond memories of the time I was famous. When I’m 90, I’ll say ‘Harry Potter was once very big, you know!’

‘In the short term, to get some peace back won’t be a bad thing. People say to me, ‘Can you walk down the street unmolested?’ In Edinburgh, it’s the exception, really. Anyone can come up to me. So either Edinburgh people are really cool and pretend not to notice, to leave you alone, or they genuinely don’t notice me. I think probably the latter. Compared to an actress or a politician, I really get nothing. It’s just to me that it was a huge shock. Because I didn’t expect anything at all.’

A barometer of just how much impact Harry Potter books have had on their readers has arrived in the form of 10 contest-winning essays commissioned by Scholastic Books, the American publisher of the Harry Potter books. Entrants were asked to write an essay answering the question, ‘How Harry Potter has changed my life.’ Each winning essay revealed diverse, poignant stories from its children writers. All 10 winners were given a breakfast with Rowling. The essays were published and featured in USA Today on Oct.19, 2000. (The stories are also available at USA Today’s Website.)

While a success, Rowling initially had her doubts about the event, though. ‘When I heard that they’d done this, I must admit I was slightly dubious,’ said Rowling. ‘Cynical. I thought this was a tall order, to say to people how Harry changed their life. But the essays were quite incredible. Some were very, very moving and painful stories. They were children who had very hard times. I’m not sure I want to share too much about that because it’s their painful lives.

‘The funniest one, by far, was Scott MacDonald [a 13-year old from Crownsville, Md.], who’d been quite a poor reader and then his grades dramatically improved because he’d been reading books so much and his writing improved. And he wrote me this letter, ‘And if you don’t believe me’ because of this paragraph quoting his grades, ‘You can call my teacher’ and he gave the full number and address. ‘Don’t call me a liar!’ [he said]. He was very sweet. I loved meeting him.’

Readers and critics have praised Rowling’s fantastic imagination in all the books. Discussing the power of imagination, Rowling noted, ‘It is an overwhelming feeling. An incredible feeling. I feel that bit is truly magical. To come here and sit opposite an adult or child who knows my characters back to front, who will argue with me about what’s inside my head, it’s the most wonderful thing. It really, really is!’

Journalists at the conference were obviously very keen about learning more details about upcoming books. Rowling happily supplied some answers. ‘I know exactly what happens to most of the characters in their past and their future. I know far more, really, than the reader needs to know, but that just makes me comfortable to know that there are no surprises for me. I know exactly what is going on.’

However, invented characters can sometimes take a life of their own and surprise their masters. ‘Hermione gave me a lot of trouble!’ laughed Rowling. ‘She was really misbehaving. She developed this big political conscience about the House elves. Well, she wanted to go her own way, and for two chapters, she just went wandering off. I just let her do it and then I scrapped two chapters and kept a few bits. That I liked. That’s the most trouble anyone’s ever given me, but it was fun so I gave her her head.’

In an attempt to glean more tidbits on Harry’s future, Rowling was asked if young Potter would become a headboy. ‘That’s weird,’ responded Rowling. ‘My daughter is obsessed with that. I don’t know why. She’s seven and she keeps saying ‘He’s going to be headboy, isn’t he?’ And I’m saying, ‘Maybe he wouldn’t want to be headboy…’ ‘No, he would!’ It’s funny you should say that. I’m not going to tell you which.’

A question also surfaced surrounding Harry Potter’s non-magical relatives, the Muggles who have always tortured or mistreated Harry, because of their fear of magic. For revenge, Harry has magically tortured his cousin Dudley. ‘I like torturing them,’ said Rowling. ‘You should keep an eye on Dudley. It’s probably too late for Aunt Petunia and Uncle Vernon. I feel sorry for Dudley. I might joke about him, but I feel truly sorry for him because I see him as just as abused as Harry. Though, in possibly a less obvious way. What they are doing to him is inept, really. I think children recognize that. Poor Dudley. He’s not being prepared for the world at all, in any reasonable or compassionate way, so I feel sorry for him. But there’s something funny about him, also. The pig’s tail was irresistible.’

As the conference came to a close, there was time for two final comments: ‘What kind of a kid was I? Short, squat. Very thick National Health glasses. That doesn’t mean anything to you, does it? National Health free glasses were like bottle bottoms. That’s why Harry wears glasses. Shy? Yes, I was a mixture of insecurities and bossy. I was very bossy to my sister, but quite quiet with strangers. Very bookish. Terrible at sports. That part about Harry being able to fly so well is probably total wish fulfillment. I was very uncoordinated. [I was] never happier than when [I was] reading or writing. [I] wanted to be a ballerina at one brief point, which is very embarrassing in retrospect because I was virtually spherical.’

Finally, in her parting words, Rowling said, ‘I wrote the book for me. I never expected it to do this. That it has done [so well] is wonderful. I mean, if I can honestly believe that I created some readers, then I feel I wasn’t just taking up space on this Earth. I feel very, very proud. But I didn’t set out to do that and my first loyalty, as I say, is to the story as I wanted to write it. I’m hopeful that my readers will stay with it.’

Stepping up to leave, Rowling almost gets out the door until a young girl at the front row stretches her arm forward with a sketch drawing. It catches Rowling’s eyes. She hesitates and steps forward to take the drawing and look at it. She pulls out a pen and offers autographs. Photographers and television news cameramen quickly crowd around her, documenting the event, as the young children excitedly open their books and prepare them for an impromptu signing. A still photographer crouches from the floor, looking up with his camera, attempting to get the right angle. After signing a few books, Rowling and her people usher out of the room and forward into a day in which she performed two readings to a total of 10,000 eager fans at the Pacific Coliseum.

Editor’s note: Cinescape is now a part of Fandom.com

©2000 Mania Entertainment, LLC. All rights reserved.

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Ensaio: Uma conversa com J.K. Rowling

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Tradução: Bruno Radcliffe
Revisão: {patylda}
*OK Categorias e Conteúdo

Time Magazine staff. “Essay: A Conversation with J.K. Rowling; A Good Scare,” Time Magazine, October, 30, 2000

The wizard of Harry Potter explains what kids need to know of the dark side

At the approach of Halloween, we asked the author of the Harry Potter books what she thinks children should know about good and evil, magic and mayhem. Why did her series take a dark turn in this year’s Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Bloomsbury), for example? Rowling plans to spend Halloween at home in Scotland with her daughter Jessica, 7, who wants to dress as the broomstick-riding hero. Says the author: “Halloween, you’d not be surprised to know, is my favorite holiday.” Her comments:

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.

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J.K. Rowling apavorada com o encontro em SkyDome

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Tradução: Leli Weasley
Revisão: {patylda}
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Stoffman, Judy. “‘Terrified’ of SkyDome date, Harry Potter author admits — Her biggest audience for a reading was 2,000,” The Toronto Star, 23 October 2000

The world’s most popular children’s author, J. K. Rowling, admitted yesterday that she’s “terrified” of reading at the SkyDome tomorrow.

“I really enjoy doing readings, but I’ve never done it before in these numbers,” the writer of the Harry Potter series said yesterday at a Toronto press conference.

“The most I’ve read for was 2,000 in Germany, with a translator,” she said at the Royal York Hotel, where she later was given the keys to the city by Mayor Mel Lastman and spoke briefly at a $500-a-plate benefit luncheon.

She joked she agreed to do the SkyDome reading in a weak moment when she was in the middle of writing Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the latest in the series, and just wanted to be left alone to write.

“The reading is a way to reach a lot of children. But I’m plainly not a rock star, not the Rolling Stones.”

Organizers for the reading, part of the International Festival of Authors, will not comment on ticket sales, saying only the SkyDome has been configured to hold 36,000 spectators.

In person, Rowling (her friends call her Jo) is a slim, intense young woman dressed conservatively in black and gray, with longish blonde hair whose dark roots show. Her elegant hands sport a French manicure and she wears dangly diamond earrings and a diamond studded watch as her only ornaments.

She handles the media like a pro, ignoring the many cameras pointed in her direction. She answers questions succinctly, but it’s clear she is more relaxed with children – many of them approached her starry-eyed at the luncheon afterwards – and likes their questions better since they never ask about fame or money or the Portuguese ex-husband.

She gets hundreds of queries from young readers by mail and in person: For example, what is a certain character’s favourite colour or why does a stool described as having four legs in Book 1 have three in Book 4 of the seven-part series?

“Children ask the best questions. These (the characters in her books) are mutual friends of ours that I happen to know better,” she says.

She says she writes for six to 10 hours a day, “if I have enough caffeine.”

A single mother with a small daughter, who could not afford a computer to write with until the Scottish Arts Council gave her a grant, she is tired of the notion that hers is a Cinderella story.

“It doesn’t feel that way when you’re living it. We were very broke and now I’m grateful every day that I don’t have to worry about money.

“But it was a lot of hard work. I was not sitting by the fireplace waiting to be discovered by the prince.”

In the past three years, since the runaway success of her stories about the orphaned boy wizard, Harry Potter, and his escapades with his friends Ron and Hermione at the Hogwarts School Of Witchcraft and Wizardry, she has reportedly become the second-richest woman in the United Kingdom, after the Queen.

“Magic is a perennial theme in children’s literature because children are so powerless,” she explained.

She said she had not planned to write as long a book as her latest, Harry Potter And The Goblet Of Fire (635 pages). “I nearly had a heart attack when I first printed it out, but I needed that many words to tell the story.”

She promised the next one, to be called Harry Potter and the Order Of The Phoenix, will be shorter, but would reveal nothing more about it.

Will there be life after Harry? “I’ll definitely be writing post-Harry. It will be hard to let go of him. I’ll be slightly bereaved. I may write something for adults or I’ll continue to write for children. One thing for sure, I’ll write. I’ve been writing since I was 6. But I know I’ll never have a success like Harry again.”

The luncheon that followed raised money for the Osborne Collection of the Toronto Library, a collection of historical children’s books that Rowling visited for an hour on Saturday at the Lillian H. Smith branch on College St.

“She was wonderful, very appreciative,” said Leslie McGrath, head of the collection. “We showed her her own books in special cases, and told her they would still be here in 200 years.”

The Toronto-based collection houses more than 60,000 literary works, with some dating back to the 14th century.

Fittingly, since she lives in Edinburgh, Rowling was piped into the ballroom of the hotel by a bagpipe player.

Lastman, billed as “Toronto’s chief Muggle,” gave her the key to the city, saying she has a gift to inspire children to read.

“May Harry Potter live in the hearts and minds of the young and the young-at-heart,” he said. He also gave her a pair of foam moose antlers.

Rowling spoke about her visit to the Osborne Collection and expressed the hope that “it will continue to flourish and expand.”

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Saí­do da dificuldade, Harry nasceu

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Tradução: Rö. Granger
Revisão: {patylda}
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Martin, Sandra. “Out of adversity, Harry was born,” The Globe Review (Toronto), 23 October 2000

J.K. Rowling tells SANDRA MARTIN how, as a single mother, she battled depression and poverty. Her daughter and her writing were her salvation

TORONTO — Fast talking, funny in a smart-alecky south-of-England way, J.K. Rowling has all the trappings of celebrity, but none of the attitude.

She gets the job done, whether it is writing her phenomenally successful Harry Potter books or talking to journalists about her work, her life and Harry himself.

Rowling is scheduled to perform in the biggest reading of all time at the SkyDome on Tuesday morning as part of the International Festival of Authors in Toronto. Before she can connect with her readers, if that’s possible in such a cavernous facility (she admits she’s terrified), there is business to accomplish. And that means, handlers, schedules, a news conference, a charity lunch and quick hits with press and television journalists.

Because she doesn’t waste time on entrances, I couldn’t even spot her at first, among the milling arrangers in the hotel room set aside yesterday for an exclusive interview. Partly that’s because she’s so tiny. She’s wearing grey tweed trousers, a black pullover and jacket and high-heeled black boots. Her hair still flops over her small black-rimmed eyes, but she has changed the colour from red to blond with dark roots. She gave up smoking in May and is now addicted to nicotine-flavoured gum — all of which she cheerfully admits in the first minute of conversation.

The facts about Joanne Kathleen Rowling are almost as well known as the miserable details of Harry Potter’s upbringing with his guardians, those dreadful Muggles, the Dursleys.

Rowling, who was born 35 years ago in the bizarely named town of Chipping Sodbury near Bristol in England, is a single mother, who fled a bad marriage shortly after her daughter, Jessica, was born, and subsequently found herself very poor and very depressed.

What matters to Rowling is what happened next both to her and to Harry Potter. “I was very lucky,” she says. “I didn’t suffer depression for very long, but I vividly recollect what it felt like. I had no hope and I didn’t believe I would ever feel lighthearted again.”

Depression and death are central themes in the Harry Potter books, even though they are billed as simple adventure stories about wizards and magic potions. The goal of the evil Lord Voldemort is to conquer death, presumably by living forever. Rowling agrees that idea is very important to the story, but she won’t reveal her own views about the finality of death or the possibility of everlasting life until she has finished all seven books in the series.

“I feel that I am halfway through writing an enormous book, and I am very frustrated that people are making assumptions about what I am saying when I haven’t said it yet.”

She won’t give away too much for the “banal and obvious” reason that she doesn’t want her readers to guess the outcome. What she will allow is that in the upcoming book five, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, readers will take “a very big step with me” in examining what death means to survivors and the bereaved.

Harry knows far more about death than most children: He is an orphan whose mother was murdered trying to protect him from Vordemort. His quest in the book is not only to fight evil, but to find out about himself and his background.

His yearning for his parents is heartfelt and mirrors Rowling’s own longing for her mother, who died from multiple sclerosis when she was 45 and Rowling was 20. She definitely was thinking of her mother in the first book, when Harry looks in the mirror and sees his parents. But “it would never be enough seeing her for five minutes,” Rowling says. “That is one of the things you work through.”

What she loves about Harry as a hero is his vulnerability and his belief in hope. That is what makes him so susceptible to the Dementors, vile creatures that suck hope out of the mouths of their victims. Rowling created the Dementors to symbolize depression, the malaise that nearly toppled her half a dozen years ago.

“I don’t mean feeling sad,” she says. “That is a normal, healthy emotion. Depression is losing the ability to feel certain emotions and one of them is hope.”

For her daughter’s sake, she sought counselling. “She was my touchstone. If it hadn’t been for her, I probably would never have had the courage to go to the doctor and say I needed to talk about things.”

Another salvation was writing.

Rowling had invented Harry Potter in a flash on a train journey from Manchester to London about six months after her mother died. But she began to write much more purposefully, sitting in cafes and writing in longhand while her daughter slept. “Writing was very helpful to my sanity. It gave me something to focus on.”

She admits that she was lucky to be able to write, even when she was classified as clinically depressed, and that she could find the discipline to turn off the television at night and to snatch whatever time she could when her daughter was sleeping during the day. “I couldn’t afford the luxury of writer’s block. I had two hours max.” She says she has probably never been as productive since then, in terms of the number of words she produces every day.

“If you know that she might not nap tomorrow, you are going to seize the opportunity. So out of adversity . . .,” she laughs.

That discipline has never left her — as is obvious from her production of four books in as many years. Even so, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix will probably not appear in the summer of 2001.

Rowling found the fourth book, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, a real slog. “I’ve never worked such long hours on a book and I don’t want to do that again. Ten hours a day are not good when you have a child.”

The problem is not the rigors of Pottermania and her celebrity, but that she wants to spend more time with her daughter, who is now 7. Who wouldn’t? “Yeah,” she laughs, joking that she will speed up the writing schedule again when Jessica is a teenager. “She won’t want to see me then anyway, but while she does, I think it would be a good idea if we spent some time together.”

Pacing and plot construction are her obsessions as a writer. Rowling disagrees with Nancy Mitford’s description of plot construction as a deadly virtue. For her it is supremely important. Her all-time favourite model for pacing is Jane Austin, which is surprising considering their styles and rhythms are so different.

“I’m not saying I’m great at it,” she adds quickly, “but that’s what I’m aiming for. I love to read a well-paced book and to feel that the rhythm is drawing you in like music.”

Her other passion is correcting misconceptions in the media.

Top of the list is the notion that she is nostalgic about the boarding-school novels she read in her own childhood.

It isn’t childhood she loves, it is children in all their complexity and vulnerability. That is what draws them to her and her books.

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A criadora de Harry: J.K. Rowling na conferência de imprensa

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Tradução: Salas Wulfric
Revisão: {patylda}
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Hoover, Bob. “HARRY’S CREATOR: J.K. Rowling at Toronto press conference yesterday,” The Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, 23 October 2000

MEDIA SAVVY: J.K. Rowling’s fame came suddenly, but she has quickly learned how to charm a media crowd, like the one she faced yesterday at the Royal York Hotel. She will read at the SkyDome tomorrow.

The question was not, How big was it, but How strange was it? Befitting the fantastical nature of her “Harry Potter” books, J.K. Rowling’s appearance yesterday in the concrete cave called SkyDome was from start to finish, one of the most bizarre literary events ever.

Accompanied by actors in wizard robes and pointed caps, sparkling bursts of fireworks and Gustav Holst’s “The Planets,” the slightly built 35-year-old magician of children’s books shyly slipped onto the stage amid deafening shrieks and screams of thousands of Canadian schoolchildren.

She appeared even tinier in the huge sports stadium, even though a 100-foot high black drape sliced the space into the size of a major- league infield. Backing the stage, which stood around second base, were three large TV screens.

Thirty-five thousand seats were available, including 1,000 on the floor which went for $234 (Canadian) each. Ticket prices ranged from that figure to $5.85 for the highest reaches. Those seats were largely filled; the rest of the SkyDome sections were less than half full.

By yesterday afternoon, organizers had yet to announce the number of total tickets sold.

Brought here by Toronto’s Literary Festival of Authors, Rowling capped two days of brief media appearances with this reading, a sharp departure from the serious literary nature of the 21-year-old festival. Why did she do it?

“This was purely a way of satisfying a lot of people at one go. I was working 10 hours a day, and I thought the book [`Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’ ] was never going to end,” she told an earlier press conference. “I said yes to a couple of things, and SkyDome was one of them.”

Despite her claim that she was “terrified” of such a crowd, Rowling read wonderfully from Chapter 4 of “Goblet,” proving herself to be an accomplished actress as well. In a dark blue jacket with an open-collared white blouse, she never stumbled and moved easily from one character to the next.

At this point, the mammoth dome was perfectly silent.

Rowling read for about 45 minutes, then quickly ran through answers to questions she said had been asked of her in Toronto. Several groans followed her announcement that Book 5, called “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix,” won’t be written by next summer.

“I took a rest after Book 4, and I hope you understand,” she told her disappointed fans. “But, I am writing it now and am really loving it.”

Rowling declined to get into specifics about her next book. But she did give one hint: Ginny Weasley, the younger sister of Harry’s best friend, Ron Weasley, will play a major role in Book 5.

She added that she has retained final script approval for the first Harry Potter movie, now being filmed in England, and that she has written the last chapter in Book 7, the final one in her plan.

“I feel as if I’m halfway through writing an enormous book, and I am very frustrated that people are making assumptions about what I am saying when I haven’t said it all yet.”

While Rowling refuses to speed up her writing schedule for the rest of the “Harry Potter” series, she did offer some consolation to her impatient fans. She’s just completed two short Potter-related books that will be published in March, with proceeds going to Comic Relief, an anti-poverty organization in Great Britain.

One of the volumes is titled “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” and is a book on one of Harry’s Hogwarts’ school supply lists. The other book, “Quidditch Through the Ages,” is a in-depth look at the fast-paced wizard sport played on broomsticks that is a key element of the Potter books.

“It was pure joy to write those books,” Rowling said. “Lots of the material I had already written and had to cut from the books. It was way too much detail for the books.”

Rowling has expressed her dismay at complaints about the witchcraft of “Harry Potter” but remained defiant about her subject.

“Do my books encourage Satanism?” she asked. She then answered, “No, and you are a lunatic. That’s it. Thank you very much”

With a couple of modest waves, Rowling disappeared into the pitch- black drapery and was gone. She’ll surface later this week in Vancouver.

She appeared at the festival and an event for the Toronto Public Library here for no fee. Proceeds for yesterday’s event went directly to the festival.

Despite the constant media attention in Canada’s largest city, Rowling revealed little new in her various pronouncements, but her answers showed that some strain was beginning to show.

Her success was not a fluke. “Writing is a lot of hard work,” she said. “I was not sitting by the fireplace waiting to be discovered by the prince.”

Her writing schedule is “six to 10 hours a day depending on how much caffeine I’ve had.”

Rowling also insisted that she lives a “quiet life” in Edinburgh, raising her 7-year-old daughter, Jennifer, and sending her to public school. Reports from her native England claim she is now the second wealthiest woman in Great Britain, after Queen Elizabeth.

And, with 35 million “Harry Potters” in print, it’s safe to say she’s one of the world’s most popular authors.

Despite Rowling’s presence, festival organizers also presented two other children’s writers at yesterday’s reading — Canadians Kenneth Oppel and Tim Wynne-Jones. They had to be the bravest men in Ontario.

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Harry Potter: Ela precisa dizer mais?

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Tradução: Leli Weasley
Revisão: {patylda}
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Baker, Jeff. “Harry Potter: Need she say more? J.K. Rowling talks about her wildly popular books,” The Oregonian, October 22, 2000

J.K. Rowling has no need to do interviews. With more than 32 million copies of the Harry Potter series in print in the United States alone, Rowling doesn’t need publicity to sell her books.

Yet there she was in the New York City offices of her publisher, Scholastic, cheerfully answering questions from five newspaper reporters on a telephone conference call. Why?

“I see this as an opportunity to answer kids’ questions,” Rowling said. “My post bag is now getting pretty much overwhelming at the moment. Although we answer every letter, the logistics of the thing are that I can’t go to every school that asks me to visit and I can’t do every reading that people would like me to do. It’s a way of responding to questions about things that are coming and a way of reaching people without going to each of these communities, which would be very difficult now.”

In a 45-minute interview from 3,000 miles away, Rowling came across as bright, energetic and not at all intimidated by her success. She talked animatedly about that success, dropped a few hints about what’s coming next in the series, took a strong stand against censorship and made it clear that writing remains her top priority.

Rowling’s reason for doing an interview makes sense. Her comments have been organized by topic and edited only for continuity. Note that she refers to books in her series by number, not title. Thus, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” is Book Four, “Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” is Book One, and the new, untitled book is Book Five.

On the new book: “Book Five is under way, but I haven’t gotten that far through it yet. It’s very unlikely to be out by next July, purely because I just finished this very long, complex book (Book Four), and I want to make it as good as I can make it.

“I don’t want to be writing against an artificial deadline. It’ll be done when it’s done, and I have no intention of taking any kind of a break from the series because I’m still loving the writing.”

On her writing schedule: “On an ideal day, I’ll probably work between six and 10 hours. That would be a really good writing day for me. I’m kind of fighting to get time to write at the moment, which feels bizarrely familiar to me because that’s how I wrote the first two books because then I had a paying job.

“I do still write longhand, and I do write away from the house whenever possible because it’s very easy to get distracted when you’re home. I use cafes as offices, really, with the added bonus that there’s normally good music and someone to bring me coffee all the time, which is great.”

On her characters: “Harry and Ron and Hermione I love, and I think there’s something of me in all three of them.

“Hagrid I absolutely adore, although I wouldn’t say there’s a great deal of my personality in Hagrid. He’s almost created in response to me. I think most kids would love to have a friend like Hagrid. (Actor) Stephen Fry, who reads the books for audiotape in Britain, said to me young boys need someone like Hagrid because they need someone to sit there whittling and saying yes, yes, while they’re pouring out their anguished souls. Someone to sit there and listen and be very stolid and reassuring. I would hope there’s none of me in the Dursleys.”

On the bookstore parties for book four: “It was wonderful. On July the 8th, I was in a hotel in London waiting to start the tour. In the U.K. I did a very short tour, starting in London and going north to my hometown, and we stopped and did some signings and met a lot of readers. But when I was in my hotel I was watching the TV and they flashed up this huge bookstore in central London where all these kids were waiting for books. My daughter was sleeping in the room and I had this mad desire to pull on my jeans and go down there and see them.”

Is the reaction overwhelming? “With the kids, never. And I really mean that. It’s really quite extraordinary because I’m an ex-teacher and I know kids aren’t angels. I’ve met thousands and thousands of kids now, of all different nationalities, at signings and readings, and I’ve never had a kid be obnoxious. Ever.”

On expectations: “It’s really not a burden. It’s a profound treat. There’s a tendency to underestimate children on all sorts of levels. I sincerely believe that children really want to hear the story as I’ve imagined it. They want to hear how it ends. They do not want to change one single paragraph. They want to find out what happens next. They want me to tell the story I want to tell.”

On being dropped from the new york times best-seller list: (The Times created a separate list for children’s books, in direct response to Rowling’s domination of the fiction list.) “Well, I didn’t throw a party (laughs). It’s a difficult one. I know why it was done, I know the reasoning behind it, we’ve all seen the reasoning behind it. I was a bit sad.”

On other writers: “Philip Pullman is a writer I very much admire. I think he can write most adult authors off the page. . . . I think he’s amazing. His book ‘Clockwork’ is a book that I think is an absolutely stunning piece of work. I often get asked at events. ‘What can I read? I’m done with the Harry Potter book.’ That’s the book I recommend. There’s a writer called David Almond, another British writer, he wrote a novel called ‘Skellig’ that I think is funny. . . . At the moment I’m reading Margaret Atwood’s “The Blind Assassin.’ ”

Are her books too scary? “That’s a matter of personal taste. I feel that the ending of Book Four is frightening. But there are reasons for that. It was not done for pure pleasure of thinking I was frightening people. I was dealing with an evil character and there’s a moral obligation, I feel, to show what that means. I don’t see (Books) Five, Six and Seven as, you know, that I have to up the stakes with every book at all. (Book Four) was a pivotal moment at the heart of the series. I wouldn’t necessarily say that Five is darker, but I can’t say that there’s isn’t more dark stuff coming because I know that there is.

“From the very first book, I would meet parents who would say, ‘Well, my 5- or 6-year-old loved it.’ I always felt reservations about saying that was a great thing because I knew what was coming in the series and even though they might be able to cope with the language perhaps some of the scenes are a little dark for a 5- or a 6-year-old. I would think probably 8 or 9 is the youngest I would recommend as a reading age for the books.”

On wrapping up: “The final chapter for Book Seven is written. I wrote that just for my own satisfaction, really as an act of faith. (To say) I will get here in the end. In that chapter you do, I hope, feel a sense of resolution. You do find out what happens to the survivors. I know that sounds very ominous (laughs).”

On merchandising the movie: (“Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone” has been cast. Rowling said she was especially delighted that Maggie Smith is playing Professor McGonagall, Robbie Coltrane is playing Hagrid and Alan Rickman is playing Snape.)

“That’s not my bag. They do ask my opinion, and I give them my opinion. My input is largely creative, it’s really with the screenwriter and the director. I’ve seen sets, and they’re amazing. It’s a very spooky experience to walk into the Great Hall, really very spooky. And Hagrid’s house . . . it’s just . . . I know every writer of the original work when they see it made physical feels the same way.

“The thing I’m excited about is seeing Quidditch, without a doubt. I’ve been seeing that inside my head for 10 years. With that, I’ll really become like a kid. I just want to sit in the back of the movie theater and watch it.”

On censorship: (The Harry Potter books have frequently been challenged in public schools and libraries. Some parents feel the books promote witchcraft and are anti-Christian.) “I really hate censorship. I find it objectionable. I personally think that they’re very mistaken. I think these are very moral books and I think it’s a very short-sighted thing. Short-sighted in the sense that if you try hard to portray goodness without showing that the reverse is evil and without showing how great it is to resist that . . . well, that’s always been my feeling about literature.

“You find magic, witchcraft and wizardry in all sorts of classic children’s books. Where do you start? Are you going to start with ‘The Wizard of Oz?’ These people are trying to protect children from their own imagination.”

Hints about the future: “There’s stuff coming with the Dursleys that people might not expect, but I’m not going to give too much away there if that’s OK. . . . Finally, I gave you something. Ginny (Weasley) does have a bigger role in Book Five.”

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Teclando sobre o Cálice de Fogo

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Tradução: Sarah Lee
Revisão: {patylda}
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Barnes and Noble & Yahoo! chat with J.K. Rowling, barnesandnoble.com, 20 October, 2000

On Friday, October 20th, Barnes & Noble.com and Yahoo! welcomed J. K. Rowling, the bestselling author behind the Harry Potter phenomenon, to chat about Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire. [Editor’s note: this chat was also published on the Yahooligans! website]

jkrowling_bn: I’m here!!!

barnesandnoble_host: Welcome, J.K. Rowling!
jkrowling_bn: great to be here

Yahooligan_Heather asks: What are you plans after you have finished the Harry Potter series? Are you considering writing a sequel series with Harry’s own children, or other characters we have met?
jkrowling_bn: Harry’s own children? Are you sure he’s going to survive to have children?!

Yahooligan_Roxie asks: Which of the Harry Potter books is your favourite so far, and why?
jkrowling_bn: My favourite two books are Goblet of Fire
jkrowling_bn: and Chamber of Secrets
jkrowling_bn: they were the hardest to write, maybe that’s why they mean most to me

missee asks: What did your daughter, Jessica, think of the fourth book? Was it too much for her to take?
jkrowling_bn: my daughter loved the fourth book
jkrowling_bn: she wasn’t scared at all
jkrowling_bn: as long as Harry was OK she didn’t seem to care

nessynoonoo asks: Greetings from California! How did you feel the first time you saw your book on sale? How have things changed with your success?
jkrowling_bn: the first time I saw my book on sale was better than receiving any literary award!
jkrowling_bn: I wanted to sneak it off the shelf and sign it
jkrowling_bn: but I was worried I’d be told off for ruining the books, so I didn’t

Yahooligan_MegMcGonagall asks: What would you see in the Mirror of Erised?
jkrowling_bn: I would probably see my mother, who died in 1990
jkrowling_bn: so, the same as Harry!

jandlcomm asks: Does Hagrid get a wife? (Chad, age 13)
jkrowling_bn: does Hagrid get a wife? You think anyone would want to live with a man who breeds Blast-Ended Skrewts?

goodyggtg asks: Is it true that you had nine rejection letters for your first HP novel? What advice would you offer to new novelists working to get their first manuscripts published?
jkrowling_bn: I’m not sure there were nine rejection letters, but there were a few
jkrowling_bn: I would say: persevere
jkrowling_bn: if everyone’s turned you down, then it’s time to try writing something else…
jkrowling_bn: and if that doesn’t suceed it MIGHT be time to think about a different career…
jkrowling_bn: but some great writers had lots of books rejected before they got published, so don’t lose heart

cynickel2 asks: We really enjoy the humor in the books, especially with the Dursleys. Are the Dursleys based on anyone you personally know?
jkrowling_bn: Hee hee hee…
jkrowling_bn: I wouldn’t tell you if they were…
jkrowling_bn: I don’t want to be sued!

Yahooligan_Tanya asks: I meant to watch Today this morning, but I heard from a friend that you revealed a bit of information. Could you share it with us?
jkrowling_bn: I can share it with you…
jkrowling_bn: a very cute eight year old boy asked me for the title of book five
jkrowling_bn: and I couldn’t resist those big brown eyes
jkrowling_bn: the title is: ‘Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix’
jkrowling_bn: so now you know!

Yahooligan_Stargull asks: How much input did you have on the marketing of “Goblet of Fire?” The marketing campaign has drawn at least as much media attention as the book itself. Thanks, love the series.
jkrowling_bn: well, I didn’t really have any input
jkrowling_bn: I just asked my publishers not to give too much away
jkrowling_bn: because book four was the culmination of ten years’ work for me
jkrowling_bn: if the ending had been given away, it would have ruined a lot of people’s pleasure

Yahooligan_Amanda asks: You’ve hinted a little that you might KILL Harry! Please say something to put my mind at ease.
jkrowling_bn: hmmmm………
jkrowling_bn: well, I think I’ll leave you in suspense… sorry!

Yahooligan_Erin asks: Is it true that Mrs. Rowling has already finished the end chapter for all her future books?
jkrowling_bn: I’ve written the final chapter of book seven
jkrowling_bn: which was really an act of faith –
jkrowling_bn: I was saying to myself, ‘you will get here!’
jkrowling_bn: it will probably need re-writing when I reach it, though

Yahooligan_David asks: I’ve heard about the two charity books that will be released in March 2001. Are these the types of schoolbooks that are referenced in the normal series books?
jkrowling_bn: Yes, I’ve written two of the titles Harry reads in the first novel
jkrowling_bn: Quidditch Through the Ages
jkrowling_bn: and Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them
jkrowling_bn: all proceeds will go to Comic Relief UK
jkrowling_bn: which is a great charity that mainly supports projects in Africa (famine relief and so on)

Yahooligan_Stephanie asks: Is Hogwarts ever going to get a defence against the dark arts teacher who lasts for more than one book?
jkrowling_bn: erm…… maybe
jkrowling_bn: don’t want to give too much away there!
jkrowling_bn: Thank you very much!

dramaangel217 asks: Hey Jo! I love your books! Ever since I encouraged people to read Harry Potter, people have been calling me Hermione! Well, what inspired you to become a writer and what sort of advice would you give to someone that wants to follow in your footsteps?
jkrowling_bn: I’ve wanted to be a writer as far back as I can remember
jkrowling_bn: I couldn’t think of anything I’d like to do more, and still can’t
jkrowling_bn: I think aspiring writers should firstly read a lot
jkrowling_bn: and resign themselves to the fact that they will waste a lot of trees before they produce jkrowling_bn: anything they’re happy with!

hermione_rose_2000 asks: Hello Ms. Rowling, I am a big fan of the Harry Potter books. My name is Katherine Emily Rose and I am 11. Is it true that Harry and Draco will have to get together and fight evil?
jkrowling_bn: Don’t believe everything you read on the net!
jkrowling_bn: I saw that rumour too… but it is just a rumour

tnt1326 asks: Is Hogwarts a complete fictional creation or is it based upon a place you’ve experienced?
jkrowling_bn: It’s completely fictional…
jkrowling_bn: but I feel like I live there a lot of the time

Yahooligan_Liz asks: The fourth book was very different form the other three, in format and action What prompted the change?
jkrowling_bn: I’m not sure that it was so different
jkrowling_bn: there was no conscious change
jkrowling_bn: the plot is becoming more complex, certainly, but that was always the plan

matiaskanfunfa asks: There is a girl named Susan Bones who was sorted in the first book and there was a family called the Bones that Voldemort tried to destroy, is this a coincidence or will Harry meet her in future books?
jkrowling_bn: Susan Bones’ grandparents were killed by Voldemort!

Yahooligan_Allison asks: Who is your favorite character in Harry Potter and the sorcerer’s stone
jkrowling_bn: Harry himself, of course, but also Ron, Hermione and Hagrid…
jkrowling_bn: then there’s Dumbledore…
jkrowling_bn: I love all of them, to be honest, even Dudley

Yahooligan_Mrs. C. asks: My class is here with me and they want to know if you would answer letters if they write to you?
jkrowling_bn: if you write to my publishers you’ll get a response!

Yahooligan_Ana asks: Hello, I would like to know if you ever read any Harry Potter fanfiction on the web.
jkrowling_bn: I have read some and I’ve been very flattered to see how absorbed people are in the world

spccbflo asks: Everything that happens has a meaning, sometimes in a later book. Do you have everything planned out in your head, or do you tie things in as you go?
jkrowling_bn: Yes, it’s all planned out, but I still give myself room to have some fun if a good idea
jkrowling_bn: arrives while I’m writing

mere2898 asks: I am a 30 year old woman who fell in love with your books this summer. I believe they contain some real life lessons for adults as well as children. What do you say to the criticts who think that the books deal with the “dark side”?
jkrowling_bn: Thank you very much for the kind words!
jkrowling_bn: to the critics I say…. get out more!
jkrowling_bn: Either they haven’t read the books properly or they can’t read at all

NEToys asks: Being close to 30 years old, I have found that the Harry Potter series has progressed from an originally labeled “Childrens Series”. Was this purposeful, or the way it just happened?
jkrowling_bn: It was always planned that way…
jkrowling_bn: I think most readers understood that things would get darker…
jkrowling_bn: they knew Voldemort was always out there and wasn’t going to go quietly!

Yahooligan_Jung asks: How are you, Ms. Rowling? I’ve really been enjoying your books, even as a high school student! At what age did you begin dreaming of having a writing career, and what were the steps you took? I’m learning English as a second language;however, I am hoping that I would be a writer someday, and am also striving for the goal. Congratulations for your success!(How’s the 5th book going? )
jkrowling_bn: The fifth book’s going well, though I haven’t done very much yet
jkrowling_bn: book four was a mammoth job and left me a bit tired!
jkrowling_bn: good luck with your ambition…
jkrowling_bn: I have wanted to be a writer since age six
jkrowling_bn: when I wrote my first ‘book’
jkrowling_bn: a story about a rabbit called ‘Rabbit’

Yahooligan_joel asks: is there going to be a harry potter when he is in his 5,6,7 years at hogwarts?
jkrowling_bn: Yes, those years will be covered by the final three books

alberici2000 asks: Mrs roberts class from hopkinton new hampshire would like to say we love your books. keep writing and we’ll keep reading.
jkrowling_bn: Thank you very much, Mrs Roberts’ class!

blaise_42 asks: In Chamber of Secrets, Hagrid is supposed to have raised werewolf cubs under his bed. Are these the same kind of werewolves as Professor Lupin?
jkrowling_bn: no… Riddle was telling lies about Hagrid, just slandering him

sammyohyeah asks: Is it just me, or was something going on between Ron and Hermione during the last half of GOF? I love your books, btw, and two of them I’ve read stright through cover to cover in under 24 hours.
jkrowling_bn: well done on the reading speed!
jkrowling_bn: yes, something’s ‘going on’…
jkrowling_bn: but Ron doesn’t realise it yet…
jkrowling_bn: typical boy

Yahooligan_Ron asks: Do you have any news that you can tell us about the next books? Why did you postpone the publishing of the fifth book and is the sixth going to be published on time?
jkrowling_bn: nothing has been postponed
jkrowling_bn: the publication of book five was never planned for July
jkrowling_bn: there is no deadline for the book
jkrowling_bn: it will be ready when it’s ready!

Yahooligan_Barnesandnoble_quest asks: As part of an ongoing project we’re conducting at Barnes & Noble.com, I’d like to ask: what are your favorite books, and why?
jkrowling_bn: Anything written by Jane Austen or Roddy Doyle…
jkrowling_bn: I love Nabakov and Colette too…
jkrowling_bn: children’s books, E. Nesbit, Paul Gallico

birdbugg asks: I picture Padfoot as a cross between a Scottish Deerhound and a Newfoundland, did you have a particular breed of dog pictured when you created him?
jkrowling_bn: not really…. I see him more as a large, bear-like mongrel

fionnualadoran asks: Hello, Ms Rowling, just a little question: what’s to become of poor old percy? will he side with fudge or with his family?
jkrowling_bn: Good question! You’ll find out in book five!

persik42 asks: Are you considering starting a series about any of the other characters at Hogwarts?
jkrowling_bn: No, I think when I’ve finished the seven Harry Potter books I will be finished with the world
jkrowling_bn: it will make me very sad to say goodbye, but it must be done!

Yahooligan_Kaya asks: Do you ever have other ideas about books but cannot put them into practice because you are writing about Harry Potter?
jkrowling_bn: Yes, but as you rightly deduce, Harry is taking all my time and energy at the moment@
jkrowling_bn: !

Hadder9 asks: Does Harry know that he is protected as long as he lives with his family?
jkrowling_bn: He sort of knows now… but he won’t know the whole truth about that for a little while

bak0y asks: Are ther going to be any more new characters?
jkrowling_bn: Yes, there are going to be new characters in book five

Yahooligan_Xi asks: I’m a BIG fan of yours and I hope you can answer this question: Why would you use most of the names in the book written in Latin?
jkrowling_bn: I like to think that the wizards use this dead language as a living language
jkrowling_bn: and it also gives readers a chance to work out clues along the way!

lhhicks99 asks: Why does Professor Dumbledore allow Professor Snape to be so nasty to the students (especially to Harry, Hermione, and Neville)?
jkrowling_bn: Dumbledore believes there are all sorts of lessons in life…
jkrowling_bn: horrible teachers like Snape are one of them!

Yahooligan_Natalie asks: Why does Harry Potter meet Voldemort in all of the books except for the third one?
jkrowling_bn: Just the way it worked out in the plot!

whoopsididitagain asks: Ms. Rowling, did you have to do any research with real witches or is all of your material from your imagination?
jkrowling_bn: No, the material is almost all from my imagination
jkrowling_bn: occasionally I will use a nice, picturesque piece of folklore, which interests me
jkrowling_bn: but real witches… I don’t know any!

mommat216 asks: I noticed each book gets a little more graphic than the last. Where do you draw the line on how graphic or scary to make each book?
jkrowling_bn: When the plot demands scary, I make it scary!
jkrowling_bn: I am led by the story, not by artificial considerations about how graphic each book should or shouldn’t be

Yahooligan_Elisabeth’s Mum asks: We came in late and don’t know if this question has been asked yet. Is your daughter now old enough for you to read the books to her? If yes, is she enjoying them?
jkrowling_bn: Yes, she has now read all four books
jkrowling_bn: she loves them, which makes my job loads easier
jkrowling_bn: she is nagging me for book five already, you will be pleased to hear
jkrowling_bn: ‘get in your office and write!’

Yahooligan_Beth asks: Does Harry play a musical instrument and it he does which one?
jkrowling_bn: No, poor Harry never got access to a musical instrument at the Dursleys’
jkrowling_bn: and he’s been too busy at Hogwarts to learn the piano!

p_mccorkle asks: I think the New York Times made a mistake in splitting their Bestseller List into Children’s and Adults. Congrats for not buying into the “short attention span” myth.
jkrowling_bn: I’m glad to see people weren’t daunted by the length of Goblet, too!
jkrowling_bn: well, the New York Times had their reasons, I suppose, but I can’t say I was delighted!

Yahooligan_seachellie4 asks: What house was Hagrid in?
jkrowling_bn: Hagrid was in Gryffindor, naturally!

Yahooligan_Tanya asks: Where do you come up with the words that you use, the names of the classes and spells and games, etc. For example, the Patronus Expectumous, was it?
jkrowling_bn: expecto patronum – you were close!
jkrowling_bn: that’s Latin… go and look it up… a little investigation is good for a person!
jkrowling_bn: mostly I invent spells, but some of them have particular meanings
jkrowling_bn: like ‘avada kedavra’
jkrowling_bn: I bet someone out there knows what that means

Yahooligan_Zeb asks: Does Arabella Figg have an important role in the later books?
jkrowling_bn: You’ll be seeing Mrs. Figg in book five and you’ll find out all about her

Yahooligan_Claire asks: It’s not fair! I know of a school that has Harry Potter as a literature book! We get stuck with Anne of Green Gables!!!
jkrowling_bn: I’m laughing… what’s wrong with Anne of Green Gables?!
jkrowling_bn: I suppose she is a bit perky…
jkrowling_bn: well, at least you don’t HAVE to read the Harry books, they can just be for fun
jkrowling_bn: probably the best way to enjoy a book

faheem90 asks: Who is the head of Ravenclaw? Professor Sinistra perhaps?
jkrowling_bn: No, the head of Ravenclaw is good old Professor Flitwick!

Yahooligan_siddharth asks: is there really a new character named”icicle”in your next book
jkrowling_bn: Where are you people getting this stuff???
jkrowling_bn: No….. nobody called icicle, I promise

Yahooligan_Sheila asks: At the Back of Harry Potter and the Chamber of secrets you have letters from people Howdo you decide who’s letters to put in?
jkrowling_bn: My UK publisher selected those letters
jkrowling_bn: friends of mine asked whether I wrote them all left-handed, but I promise I didn’t

toncaw asks: Is Sirius Balck ever going to be cleared?
jkrowling_bn: can’t tell you, that’s too important a bit of information!

Yahooligan_Jeff & Jon asks: Does your hand hurt after writing all those pages?
jkrowling_bn: my hand never hurts after writing the novels
jkrowling_bn: but signing thousands of books at a time can make your hand ache
jkrowling_bn: because you keep thumping it down on the page!

Yahooligan_hpcandy asks: What do you think would be you favourite candy from Honeydukes?? I think mine would be the sherbert balls that Ron likes…..
jkrowling_bn: If you buy ‘Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them’ you will find out an ingredient of those sherbert balls
jkrowling_bn: and you might not want to eat them quite so much!
jkrowling_bn: I’d definitely want chocolate frogs
jkrowling_bn: I’d like to collect the cards

Yahooligan_Eric_28 asks: What does the K stand for?
jkrowling_bn: It stands for ‘Kathleen’

onegreatguy99 asks: Do you like to type your books or write freehand and have someone transcribe later?
jkrowling_bn: I write the books longhand and then I type them onto my laptop myself
jkrowling_bn: that’s how I do my first edit
jkrowling_bn: nobody else is allowed to type my books
jkrowling_bn: because I’m a very secretive writer!

JCBingel asks: Once the Harry Potters are finished, what will be your next project?
jkrowling_bn: I’m not too sure… I will definitely continue to write, because I always have written

Yahooligan_Amanda asks: Why is Book 5 gonna be called “Order of the Phoenix”? P.S. I love your books.
jkrowling_bn: You people don’t stop, do you?!
jkrowling_bn: I’M NOT TELLING!!!!

wyzeguy719 asks: The first four books have been getting longer, but number 4 was huge! Is number five likely to be shorter than number 4?
jkrowling_bn: Yes, five is going to be shorter than four
jkrowling_bn: I always knew four would be the longest so far
jkrowling_bn: but even I didn’t expect it to be that long

katiekarbuncle asks: Since Gryffindor seems to be the favorite house, does that mean you value bravery over wit and kindheartedness and cunning(the signatures of the other 3 houses)?
jkrowling_bn: I value wit and kindheartedness a lot, but yes, I think bravery would get my vote in a contest

Duck__69 asks: Are you going to get more mature themes as your books age or are you going to keep it geared toward younger kids
jkrowling_bn: I think an eight or nine year old will be able to read all seven books
jkrowling_bn: that’s my intention
jkrowling_bn: however, Harry is growing up, so obviously he will face certain issues an eight year old won’t
jkrowling_bn: I don’t think, however, that that will be uninteresting for an eight year old

moakes40 asks: I was wondering about Dumbledore’s facial expression in Goblet when he found out that Voldemort had touched Harry. The narrative says that Dumbledore reacted with a look of triumph. Aside from the problem of interpreting triumph on someone’s face, I was wondering if that is an attempt to throw question on Dumbledore’s character or is he triumphant, perhaps, that Harry can be touched by LV without being destroyed (or something like that)?
jkrowling_bn: I frequently look triumphant
jkrowling_bn: I’ll have you know
jkrowling_bn: well, I’m sure you won’t be surprised that i’m not going to explain why Dumbledore looked that way
jkrowling_bn: well-spotted though

mikewhiskey asks: Why do you think that people are so entranced by Harry?
jkrowling_bn: erm…. you would have to ask them!
jkrowling_bn: I never analyse the books in that way
jkrowling_bn: I think it would be dangerous to think about other people’s reactions too much
jkrowling_bn: I prefer to keep writing for myself

Yahooligan_Michelle asks: Will Quidditch Through the Ages and Fantastic Beast and Where to find them be available in the US?
jkrowling_bn: Yes, they will be available in the US for a limited time only
jkrowling_bn: you will be saving lives if you buy them, so order NOW!

blenon_2000 asks: Will you be in the movie, like as an extra or something?
jkrowling_bn: Nooooooooooooo….. I hate looking at myself on screen
jkrowling_bn: maybe I could be a Dementor and hide under a cloak
jkrowling_bn: but I’m not tall enough

gold44r asks: Ms. Rowling, I have a daughter who is resisting reading your books because they are so popular. She doesn’t want to appear to be going along with the crowd. How do you feel about the explosve popularity of your books personally, and why should she read them?
jkrowling_bn: I really identify with your daughter!
jkrowling_bn: A couple of years ago everyone was telling me to read Captain Corelli’s Mandolin
jkrowling_bn: and I didn’t want to
jkrowling_bn: then I cracked and read it and loved it –
jkrowling_bn: I wanted to talk about it to everyone
jkrowling_bn: and of course they’d moved on by then and thought I was very boring

sam096 asks: Were the Weasley twins inspired by anyone you know?
jkrowling_bn: Yes, they were
jkrowling_bn: but I don’t want to say who, because they’ll be persecuted

Yahooligan_Brian asks: Will Ron ever get a girlfriend?
jkrowling_bn: I’m laughing again… why wouldn’t he?!
jkrowling_bn: though he’s not doing too well at the moment, is he?
jkrowling_bn: but then, Fleur Delacour was really aiming a bit high

monicapilman asks: The character of Professor Snape fascinates me. Will you reveal his backstory further in the next Harry Potter book?
jkrowling_bn: you will find out more about Snape in future books
jkrowling_bn: keep an eye on him!

barnyardash asks: Is the real Moody ever going to be in the books? And is he as cool as the imposter Moody (from Ashley, a Harry obsessed 19 year old)
jkrowling_bn: the real Moody is even cooler!
jkrowling_bn: yes, Harry will see him again

Yahooligan_Dhanya asks: Do you plan to give Voldemort his victory or somehow break his immortality to kill him?
jkrowling_bn: Dhanya, do you really really think I’ll answer that?!
jkrowling_bn: I don’t blame you for asking though…

slickington2000 asks: Hello. I was just wondering how the artist who draws the book covers in the series gets the image of Harry Potter? Did you design him yourself?
jkrowling_bn: No, I didn’t have any input on that
jkrowling_bn: Mary Grandpre simply read the books and interpreted them herself

iamcanadian1414 asks: Hi J.K what other things do you do instead of write your books? do you play sports? or garden?
jkrowling_bn: Laughing again… if you could see my garden!
jkrowling_bn: And if you watched me playing sports you’d know I couldn’t practise much
jkrowling_bn: mostly I read, draw and sleep (though the third one doesn’t happen much)

Yahooligan_Jennifer asks: Did Harry ever use magic on Dudley in the real world?
jkrowling_bn: Not so far (hint)

deac20187 asks: I am a 57 year old clergyman and loved the series. How do you answer fundamentalist clergy objections?
jkrowling_bn: I am sending you a hug across cyber-space
jkrowling_bn: I think you understand that these books are fundamentally moral (that is how I see them, in any case)
jkrowling_bn: I’m afraid there are some people who object to seeing magic in a book, per se
jkrowling_bn: and therefore a debate isn’t really viable

blazerah asks: I read your introduction in the Artists’ & Writers’ yearbook, and I was wondering- who is your literary agent?
jkrowling_bn: his name is Christopher Little

Yahooligan_Bev asks: Who are your favourite writers, and how do you feel about Stephen King saying that your books helped him during the darkest times after his accident?
jkrowling_bn: I was very, very flattered

jen2boys asks: Where do all your ideas come from? I’m amazed by the way these books have enlightened my imagination even as an adult. I can actually picture Quidditch matches!
jkrowling_bn: Thank you very much!
jkrowling_bn: That is what I am most looking forward to in the film… watching scenes I’ve been seeing in my head for ten years!

Yahooligan_Allison asks: Do you enjoy writing the books?
jkrowling_bn: I have more enjoyment in writing them than anyone could have reading them

roischur asks: Are you planing a visit in Israel?
jkrowling_bn: Not so far, but it could happen one day!
jkrowling_bn: I’m trying to concentrate on writing once I get home from this tour

Yahooligan_auror5 asks: In Prisoner of Azkaban, a character by the name of Colonel Fubster was mentioned. Is he a wizard?
jkrowling_bn: No, he’s a Muggle neighbour of Aunt Marge’s (poor man)

michaelbeeee asks: Ms. Rowling, Are you aware that more adults read the books than children? If so, might there not be a place for a series on an adult H.P following the 7th book?
jkrowling_bn: I’m not sure whether it’s true that more adults read the books than children
jkrowling_bn: but in any case, I think I should stop before we get to ‘Harry Potter and the Mid-Life Crisis’!

Yahooligan_Peggy asks: Has having your books banned in some places, changed your style of writing? By the way I loved them.
jkrowling_bn: No, it would take much more than that to stop me!
jkrowling_bn: As I said before, I really write these books for me before anyone else

brucavian asks: I’m taking a class at the U of I now, called the Literature of FAntasy, and we are going to read your first book. I have not read it, but I”m an avid fantasy fan. How do you feel about what has been stirred up by your novels? I personallf feel it’s prolly hogwash, but I wanna know how you feel.
jkrowling_bn: Define ‘stirred up’…. are we talking about the religious right again?
jkrowling_bn: If so, I’d say ‘hogwash’ was a pretty good description!

Yahooligan_KYLE asks: HWO LONG DID IT TAKE YOU TO WRITE HARRY POTTER?
jkrowling_bn: Between having the idea for Harry and the first book being published was five years
jkrowling_bn: but during that time I was also doing day jobs and planning the whole series
jkrowling_bn: so I’m not as lazy as that might make me sound!

Sabine312 asks: Ms. Rowling, First, I am a huge fan of the series (I am 25 but I feel like an 11 year old waiting for my letter). There are many rumors about the Harry POtter series and I was wondering if you keep track of any of the rumors. If so, does it ever affect your writing? Thanks and keep writing. KFB and RMV
jkrowling_bn: No, as I said, nothing external really affects the writing
jkrowling_bn: I have heard and seen some of the rumours
jkrowling_bn: and very odd some of them are, too!

yellowsunstar asks: I’ve never read any Harry Potter books. I’m thinking now (after stumbling into this session) that I need to! I had no idea that they were so popular with the adults as well…thanks!
jkrowling_bn: go for it yellowsunstar… there’s always room for another Harry fan!

phredohasmail asks: have you written any books that were published before this series?
jkrowling_bn: no, nothing was published, but I did write a lot
jkrowling_bn: Harry was the first thing I tried to get published
jkrowling_bn: the others really weren’t very good – nobody’s missed anything!

rockfish99_2000 asks: we love you j.k
jkrowling_bn: I love you too, rockfish99 xxx
barnesandnoble_host: Thanks for joining us, J.K. Rowling!
jkrowling_bn: I’ve enjoyed it, thanks!

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Tradução: Miss Granger
Revisão: Adriana Snape
*OK Categorias e Conteúdo

Couric, Katie. Interview of J.K. Rowling, NBC Today Show, 20 October 2000

Today Show’s Katie Couric: J.K. Rowling, author of the bestselling Harry Potter books – the most recent is “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire” – joins us for the second time this week. She’s back to answer some of the more than 1,500 email questions you (the viewers) sent to our website. Hey Jo, welcome back. Nice to see you.

J.K. Rowling: Hi, nice to be back.

Katie Couric: Looking very stylish this morning I might add.

J.K. Rowling: Thank you.

Katie Couric: Listen, as I said, we got over 1,500 emails and a lot of people really wanted to know – and I know you’re sick of this question…

J.K. Rowling: When’s book five…

Katie Couric: Exactly.

J.K. Rowling: Yes, I knew it. Probably not next July because I’ve just finished a very long and complex book. But book five is underway. I’m not taking a break from the writing – I still love the writing. But it will be done when it’s done.

Katie Couric: Right. Can I ask you sort of an annoying question? How far along are you in book five?

J.K. Rowling: Not that far. I have started but I’m not that far at all.

Katie Couric: So people may have to wait…?

J.K. Rowling: A little bit.

Katie Couric: A little bit…so they’re going to have to be patient. They’re going to have to read like one through four for the 27th time.

J.K. Rowling: (Laughs) Right. Or read something else. The world is not only Harry Potter.

Katie Couric: Exactly, that’s a very good point. Alright, let me tell you some of the email questions that we selected. Emma, who’s age 11, says “Dear J.K. Rowling, when you were a little girl, what were your favorite books?”

J.K. Rowling: My favorite books…when I was about eight, my favorite book was a book called “The Little White Horse” by Elizabeth Goudge, which is a very magical book.

Katie Couric: Is that an English author?

J.K. Rowling: She’s an English author. I wouldn’t advise boys to read her.

Katie Couric: Why?

J.K. Rowling: Because there’s a lot in it about the heroine stresses, which I really enjoyed but I would imagine most boys won’t enjoy.

Katie Couric: Well I don’t know…maybe they’d be enlightened.

J.K. Rowling: Maybe, but I’m just trying to be true to my readers here. What else do I like? E. Nesbit is a really great writer. She’s a favorite of mine. And Paul Gallico – I’m sorry he’s not more fashionable now – he’s a great writer.

Katie Couric: And what did he write that you enjoy?

J.K. Rowling: My favorite one of his is a book called “Manx Mouse,” which is a very quirky little book. I loved it.

Katie Couric: Here’s Sarah, she’s nine. (Reading next email) “I’m nine years old. I live in Rhode Island. My question for Ms. Rowling is: Will you keep writing Harry Potter books that will take him through his adult life? He could be a teacher at Hogwarts!”

J.K. Rowling: I’m intrigued because everyone seems very confident I’m not going to kill him.

Katie Couric: Well good! I hope you’re not! (Both laugh.)

J.K. Rowling: I’m not saying either way.

Katie Couric: That would make big news here this morning.

J.K. Rowling: Everyone assumes that there will be an adult life and maybe they’re right. But no, I think I’m going to stop at seven. I’m not going to say “never another one.” If I had a burning desire to do another one, I’d do it. But at the moment, I’m planning to stop at seven.

Katie Couric: Kathy from Georgia says: “In all four books, Hermione constantly refers to the book ‘Hogwarts, a History’. Are you considering compiling and publishing such a book?”

J.K. Rowling: Not “Hogwarts, a History” but I have written two of the books that appear as titles only within the novels and that’s “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Them” and “Quidditch Through the Ages”. And they will be available in March.

Katie Couric: And the proceeds will go to Comic Relief?

J.K. Rowling: All proceeds are going to Comic Relief UK, which is a wonderful charity that’s existed since 1985 – it’s a spin-off from Live Aid. All proceeds go to famine relief and so on in Africa.

Katie Couric: And also a charity in the U.S. that’s yet to be named? Or just basically those two right now?

J.K. Rowling: Comic Relief asked me to do the books so I’d really like them to get the proceeds.

Katie Couric: Jennifer and her son, Paul, have a joint question: “Who is your favorite teacher or staff member at Hogwarts and why?”

J.K. Rowling: It’s a tie really between Dumbledore and Hagrid. But I also love Professor McGonagall. She’s a great teacher.

Katie Couric: From Casey, who’s nine from Annapolis: “Are any of the characters based on anyone you knew or know in real life?”

J.K. Rowling: Yes but obviously I have to be careful because some of my characters are pretty unpleasant. Hermione is a lot like me when I was younger – a kind of caricature of me when I was younger. Ron’s a lot like my oldest friend who was a boy I was at school with. And Gilderoy Lockhart was based on someone I knew but I’m saying no more about that. And I barely had to exagerate him.

Katie Couric: I’m not sure if we should bite this off but I’m going to. Tammy in Kansas was wondering: “What would encourage you to write books for children that are supporting the devil, witchcraft and anything that has to do with Satan?” You’ve heard that before.

J.K. Rowling: Well nothing would encourage me to do that because I haven’t done it so far so why would I start doing it now?

Katie Couric: You have heard criticism along those lines ever since the beginning, and I think it also grew since more and more books came out.

J.K. Rowling: A very famous writer once said: “A book is like a mirror. If a fool looks in, you can’t expect a genius to look out.” People tend to find in books what they want to find and I think my books are very moral. I know they have absolutely nothing to do with what this lady’s writing about. So, can’t give her much help there.

Katie Couric: We’ve got some more emails that we’re going to do in a moment and then we’ve got a reading with Jim Dale, which I know everyone’s excited about. So Jo, we’ll see you in a minute. But first, this is Today on NBC.

(Cut to break. After the break, we see the show has moved outside where there are crowds, kids – some dressed in wizard capes, dry ice in “Goblet of Fire” type goblets, a real snowy owl. Excellent Harry Potter atmosphere.)

Katie Couric: One again J.K. Rowling or Jo Rowling is back and she’s brought a few of her very good friends here and some dry ice as well. Also here is Jim Dale, who’s going to read from “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.” Jim is the voice of Harry Potter and 124 other characters on the audio book version of all four Harry Potter books. And also 10 children who won the Scholastic/USA Today essay contest on “How Harry Potter Books Changed My Life.” (To the kids in the audience) Hi everybody, how are you? Good? I feel like a teacher…I’m so glad you’re here. Nice to see you. You like my cape? I’m kind of getting into the act.

Katie Couric: Alright Jo, we have another email question that we didn’t have time for. And one is about the pronunciation of all of the characters in the book. She says how in the world can you expect her to pronounce all these different characters and how are you sure that you’re getting it right yourself, and she adds that they sound very funny with a Texas accent.

J.K. Rowling: (Laughs) Erm, people will notice I put in how to pronounce Hermione in book four.

Katie Couric: Did you have a lot of people asking?

J.K. Rowling: Yeh, I introduced Hermione to a Bulgarian (in book four) who couldn’t say her name and so then she explains it, so that was my get-out-of-jail card on that one.

Katie Couric: But they are pretty fanciful names. How do you come up with them?

J.K. Rowling: Most of them are made up. Some of them are taken from maps mainly…I like old place names.

Katie Couric: Meanwhile, as I said, 10 kids are here who won a Scholastic/USA Today essay contest. Were you moved at some of the essays about how Harry Potter changed their lives?

J.K. Rowling: I was bowled over. They were really, really great essays…the greatest.

Katie Couric: Are you overwhelmed as you travel the world and hear from so many children you have influenced?

J.K. Rowling: It’s wonderful…nothing better than that….really wonderful.

Katie Couric: Meanwhile, let me ask Jim… hi Jim, how are you? How much fun are you having recording these books?

Jim Dale: Well I was given the book on Saturday night and I was in the studio on Monday recording it, so I didn’t really read the book the whole way through. I read 100 pages a night, invented the voices, recorded them the next day, and read another 100. So I didn’t quite know where the book was going or who the villain was going to be.

Katie Couric: So you had as much fun reading the story…?

Jim Dale: I had more fun than the children, I’ll tell you that.

Katie Couric: Well I know a lot of children these days recognize your voice even if they don’t recognize your face. You’re going to be reading what for us this morning?

Jim Dale: I’m going to be reading from the last book, book four, “Harry and the Goblet of Fire”.

Katie Couric: Alright, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls…Jim Dale.

Jim Dale: (To the kids in the audience) Are you ready? Are you sitting comfortably? Here we go….

(Jim Dale, sitting in a Gothic-looking carved wood and red-cushioned chair, reads a lengthy passage from “Goblet of Fire” complete with all the character voices.)

Katie Couric: Jim Dale reading from “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire’ Thanks Jim. Thanks kids. We’ll be back in a moment. This is Today on NBC.

(Cut to break. After the break, the show remains outside.)

Katie Couric: (To kids in crowd) We’re back at 9:00 on this Friday morning, the 20th day of October, the year 2000. We’re having a great Friday morning here on Rockefeller Plaza cause we have a lot of terrific friends who have shown up to help us start our morning. Nice to see you again kids, how are you? Are you having fun?

Kids in audience: Yes!!!!!!!!!!!

Katie Couric: They’re having a great time because J.K., Jo Rowling is here, who of course is the author of the fabulously successful Harry Potter books, as well as Jim Dale, whose wonderful voice narrates the books. (Looks at Jim Dale) And you are a variety of characters on the audio tape version.

Jim Dale: (Looks at J.K. Rowling) She’s opened the floodgates on characters for this book. So far, there’s 127 I think.

J.K. Rowling: (Amid laughter) Sorry Jim.

Katie Couric: Do you think you’re going to have more characters?

J.K. Rowling: I know I am, so you should have advance warning, sorry.

Katie Couric: But you’re having a terrific time, as you said, recording these books, aren’t you?

Jim Dale: Oh, it’s the greatest fun I’ve had…the second best fun I’ve ever had, yes.

Katie Couric: And I mentioned earlier, Jim, I really didn’t get a chance to elaborate, but when you travel around the country and people hear your voice, they say “hey!”

Jim Dale: Oh I get muggled, I get muggled, yes absolutely.

Katie Couric: Which is terrific. Well some of these kids have questions for J.K. Rowling about Harry Potter. What’s your name and what’s your question?

Wide-eyed boy: My question is how did you get the Harry Potter started?

J.K. Rowling: How did I get Harry Potter started? On a train. I was on this train ride and I guess the idea just popped into my head…. it just came…great feeling.

Today Show’s Matt Lauer: K, what’s your name?

Red-headed, freckled kid: Alfred Dale.

Matt Lauer: What’s your question?

Red-headed, freckled kid: What is your favorite Harry Potter book?

J.K. Rowling: My favorite book…it’s normally the one you’ve just finished. So at the moment, my favorite book is number four. Even though it half killed me…it was the most difficult to write so far…but it’s my favorite.

Katie Couric: We should probably mention that Alfred is Jim Dale’s grandson.

Matt Lauer: He’s not from Brooklyn. We can hear that.

Katie Couric: (Laughs) Definitely not. Who else has a question…how about you?

Kid with ballcap: Hi my name’s Sam and I was wondering why did you want to write Harry Potter?

J.K. Rowling: Why did I want to write Harry Potter? I’ve always wanted to be a writer.

Kid with ballcap: Cause I like it. But I don’t like writing. I like to read stuff…I don’t like writing.

J.K. Rowling: You don’t like writing? Some days I don’t like writing either. Some days I just wish I worked in a cafe or something.

Blonde kid dressed as Harry Potter: How did you think of that name Hermione?

J.K. Rowling: Hermione…it’s a Shakespearean name. I got it out of Shakespeare’s “The Winter’s Tale.” I just thought it was an unusual name. If I’d known how difficult people would find it to pronounce, I would have called her Jane.

Katie Couric: How about some girls in here… what’s your question?

Teen-aged girl: When is the fifth book going to be coming out?

Katie Couric: Oh, there it is again, sorry Jo.

J.K. Rowling: The most often-asked question. I don’t know. I am writing it and when it’s done, you’ll have it, I promise you.

Katie Couric: What’s your name?

Dark-haired girl: My name is Rio and in the first book, what did she mean by they frog-marched Percy around the room?

J.K. Rowling: That’s when two people stand on either side of the third person and they force them to walk along. It’s like you’re under arrest.

Blonde boy: How did you get the name of the school?

J.K. Rowling: I don’t know…I just tried several names and Hogwarts was my favorite….just sounds witchy.

Katie Couric: What about you…what’s your question?

Wee blonde girl: How did you make all those books?

J.K. Rowling: How did I make them…with a lot of effort and sometimes ten-hour days.

Matt Lauer: One more here…

Brown-eyed, dimple-cheeked boy: What is the fifth book’s name going to be?

J.K. Rowling: Ummm, should I?

Matt Lauer: Ah go ahead, it’d be a great scoop for the Today Show.

J.K. Rowling: (Laughs) I actually… I can’t really say because there are two titles I’m choosing between and last time I did this, it was all over the Internet and confused people.

Brown-eyed, dimple-cheeked boy: What are the two titles?

Matt Lauer: (Laughs) He’s a true journalist…he said give me the two (titles).

J.K. Rowling: It’s probably going to be called “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix”.

Katie Couric: The Order of the Phoenix? Well there you go!

J.K. Rowling: You got a massive piece of information.

Matt Lauer: (To brown-eyed, dimple-cheeked boy) Nice going!

J.K. Rowling: (Gives brown-eyed, dimple-cheeked boy a thumbs-up) Right up!

Katie Couric: Jo Rowling, thanks so much for coming by. Jim Dale, thanks for reading to us this morning. Kids, thank you all. We’re out of time but maybe Jo will stick around and answer a few more of your questions. And by the way, the people in the capes, with the exception of me, the young men and women are the winners of the Scholastic/USA Today essay contest. We want to recognize you and say congratulations kids. Way to go.

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Transcrição do Chat do AmericaOnLine

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America Online chat transcript, AOL.com, 19 October 2000

AOL Live presented an exclusive live chat with “Harry Potter” creator J.K. Rowling.

Good evening. This is a real treat — the most popular writer in the world. Welcome, J.K. Rowling.

Thank you!

Ms. Rowling, do you think that making a Harry Potter movie will help people understand the books better or will it ruin the imagination for the books?

I don’t think people need help understanding the books. I hope the film will be really good and not disappoint the fans. Personally, I can’t wait to watch Quidditch.

Ms. Rowling, why did you write about witchcraft and wizardry?

I had the idea of a boy who was a wizard and didn’t yet know what he was. I never sat down and wondered, “What shall I write about next?” It just came, fully formed.

When people trade in Muggle money for Wizard money, what does Gringotts do with the Muggle money?

Those goblins are sneaky people. They manage to put the Muggle money back into circulation. They are like “fences” –British slang, do you understand it?

What did James and Lily Potter do when they were alive?

Well, I can’t go into too much detail, because you’re going to find out in future books. But James inherited plenty of money, so he didn’t need a well-paid profession. You’ll find out more about both Harry’s parents later.

If YOU went to Hogwarts, which house would they put you in?

Good name, Wizard. Well, I’d hope for Gryffindor, obviously, but I suspect they might want to put me in Ravenclaw.

Ms. Rowling, where do you come up with those names of the characters, like Quidditch?

Quidditch is a name I invented. I just wanted a word which began with the letter ‘Q’ (I don’t know why, it was just a whim). Many of the names are taken from maps — for instance, Snape, which is an English village.

Ms. Rowling, have you ever made a map or blueprint of the school?

No, because all those staircases keep shifting around and rooms pop out of nowhere, and stuff just moves too much. But I have got a notebook that reminds me what floor everything is on, just to keep track. Of course, if anything moves, I can blame it on magic, not my mistakes.

What do you think of the people who want to ban your books?

I think they are… uh.. what’s a good word? Misguided. I think these are very moral books. Everyone’s entitled to their own opinion, but not to impose their views on others!

Does the animal one turns into as an Animagi reflect your personality?

Very well deduced, Narri! I personally would like to think that I would transform into an otter, which is my favorite animal. Imagine how horrible it would be if I turned out to be a cockroach!

Is it hard being famous?

Sometimes it’s wonderful, like now, when I get to meet lots of readers. Other times it’s hard, when, for instance, journalists come banging on my front door, especially when I’m cooking.

When is Hermione’s birthday?

Hermione’s birthday is September 19th.

Did you consider having a girl be the main character?

Well, I didn’t — purely because Harry came to me as a boy. And after I’d been writing about him for a few months, he was too real to me to change. However, Hermione is such a good friend too, that I don’t feel I have short-changed girls!

There so many people with “Harry Potter” screen names! One asks: Why did Dumbledore have a look of triumph in his eyes at the end of book four?

Good question… excellent question, in fact, and like all the best questions I get asked, I can’t answer it! Because it would give too much away. However, well-spotted. Have fun guessing… someone’s bound to get it right!

Why do some wizards/witches become ghosts and others don’t?

Another superb question, and this time I can tell you that you will find out much more about that in book five.

Ms. Rowling, after the first book, you stopped converting English words to American words. Is there any reason for this?

Actually, we didn’t stop, but the number of words that were changed has been greatly exaggerated! We only ever changed a word when it had a different meaning in “American,” for instance, the word “jumper,” which in England means “sweater” and here, I believe, is something that only little girls wear!

I think the color of Harry’s eyes will matter in the books to come. Yes?

Hmmmm… maybe!

Ms. Rowling, will Voldemort ever die?

Do you really, really think I will answer that?!

Where did James get his Invisibility Cloak?

That was inherited from his own father — a family heirloom!

Does everyone have a little magic in them? Even if they are Muggles? And if not, how did magic start?

I think we do (outside the books), but within my books — do you really think there’s any magic in Uncle Vernon? Magic is one of those odd talents which some have and some don’t.

Ms. Rowling, what’s your favorite spell?

My favourite spell (so far) is “expecto patronum” — the spell that conjures the Patronus.

Is there ever going to be female Defense Against The Dark Arts teacher?

Emily, I can exclusively reveal (because I’m feeling guilty I’m not answering so many good questions) that there WILL be.

Ms. Rowling, will Voldemort’s evil ways rise again, such as Muggle killings?

Well, his temper hasn’t exactly improved while he’s been away, has it? So I think we can safely say, yes.

I like the products. Could there be sweater patterns for us knitters?

Sweater patterns?!!!! Now I’ve heard everything. I really don’t know… I’ll have a word with Warner Bros.!

Why stop at seven books when you could make up Harry’s whole life?

I notice you’re very confident that he’s not going to die!

And lots of people want to know what you do for the holidays.

Christmas I’ll be at home, watching my brother-in-law cook the turkey (he’s a chef), and for New Year, I’ll be on holiday!!

Why did you make Quirrell the bad guy instead of Snape?

Because I know all about Snape, and he wasn’t about to put on a turban.

Is there a reason Fleur’s name means “flower of the heart”?

Ah, Narri, you’re nearly there… in fact, it means “flower of the court,” like a noblewoman. Heart is “coeur.” (I used to be a French teacher, sorry.)

When does the next book come out?

I don’t know! It isn’t likely to be next July, but you shouldn’t have too long a wait. I am writing it already.

Ron and Hermione give Harry gifts… does he ever give them birthday presents?

Yes, Harry does buy presents back! But I’ve never focused on their birthdays yet –there hasn’t been room!

Ms. Rowling, which character besides Harry is your favorite, and why?

I think that would have to be Hagrid — but I love Ron and Hermione too, and I also love writing characters like Gilderoy Lockhart, Snape, the Dursleys… it’s such fun doing horrible things to them.

Will we be seeing Lupin anytime soon?

Yes, Harry will be seeing Lupin again. He’s another of my favourite characters.

Will Harry time-travel again?

Not telling!

Can you say ANYTHING about the next book?

Yes… it probably won’t be as long as book four. It will be scary. Harry finds out a lot of things he hasn’t stumbled across so far.

Ms. Rowling, have you ever been inspired by another author?

The author with whom I identify most is E. Nesbit. She did some great, funny fairy tales.

Ms. Rowling, while we’re waiting for the next book, what other books do you recommend (besides your own)?

Excellent question! Read “Clockwork” by Phillip Pullman or “Skellig” by David Almond or… let’s see… anything by Paul Gallico, or “The Little White Horse” (for girls!) by Elizabeth Goudge or… ANYTHING! Just keep reading!

In fact, you’re doing two SHORT books that are coming out in March. Tell us about them.

Yes, I’ve written “Quidditch Through the Ages” and “Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them.” All proceeds will go to Comic Relief UK to help famine relief and other projects in Africa. They’ll be available in March of next year, so book early!!! You’ll be saving lives… good magic!

Night, all.

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Sobre os livros: Entrevista de JK Rowling para Scholastic.com

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“About the Books: transcript of J.K. Rowling’s live interview on Scholastic.com,” Scholastic.com, 16 October 2000

On October 16, 2000, classrooms across America went online to ask J.K. Rowling their burning questions about Harry Potter. Below is the transcript from that interview.

WARNING: The transcript below reveals plot elements from Harry Potter Books 1 through 4. If you have not read all these books, you may not want to continue.

Question: The wand chooses the wizard, of course, but what magical creature would you select for your own wand?
J.K. Rowling responds: I’d like a phoenix feather, which is why I gave it to Harry!

Question: What shape would a Boggart take if it wanted to scare you? How would you defeat it?
J.K. Rowling responds: I think I’d probably have Aragog, as Ron did. I hate spiders.

Question: I know you have had children throughout the world tell you how Harry has changed their lives, but is there any one story a child has told you that really stands out in your mind?
J.K. Rowling responds: My favourite was the girl who came to the Edinburgh Book Festival to see me. When she reached the signing table she said “I didn’t want so many people to be here — this is MY book.” That really resonated with me, because that’s how I feel about my own favourite books.

Question: Is Voldemort some sort of relative of Harry’s? Possibly his mother’s brother?
J.K. Rowling responds: I’m laughing…that would be a bit Star Wars, wouldn’t it?

Question: In your first book there is a secret message on the Mirror of Erised. Are there any other secret messages throughout the book that we should be watching for?
J.K. Rowling responds: Not secret messages of that type, but if you read carefully, you’ll get hints about what’s coming. And that’s all I’m saying!

Question: My impression is that the Harry books are getting “darker” somehow. Is this because he is growing up, and his readers have to do the same?
J.K. Rowling responds: It’s really because Voldemort is getting more powerful, but yes, also because Harry is fourteen now. At fourteen, you really do start realising that the world is not a safe and protected place — or not always.

Question: Can you give an example of a surprise in your writing process, such as a character you weren’t expecting?
J.K. Rowling responds: Yes, it was a big surprise to me that Mad Eye Moody turned out the way he did. I really like him. I didn’t expect to.

Question: How would you describe the relationship between the wizard world and the Muggle world?
J.K. Rowling responds: Uneasy co-existence! Harry discovers that life in the magical world mirrors, to a great extent, life in the Muggle world. We are all human. There’s still bigotry and small-mindedness (unfortunately).

Question: In the fourth book, when Harry tells Dumbledore about his fight with Voldemort and how Voldemort could touch him after he took Harry’s blood, Harry thinks he sees Dumbledore smile slightly. Why? Is Dumbledore really on Voldemort’s side after all?
J.K. Rowling responds: Hmmmm….like all the best questions I get asked, I can’t answer that one. But you are obviously reading carefully. I promise you’ll find out!

Question: Are there any books you would recommend to your fans to read while they await Book 5?
J.K. Rowling responds: Loads! Read E. Nesbit, Philip Pullman, Henrietta Branford, Paul Gallico. Just read!

Question: Why did you choose to make the sport Quidditch so important to life at Hogwarts?
J.K. Rowling responds: Because sport is such an important part of life at school. I am terrible at all sports, but I gave my hero a talent I’d love to have had. Who wouldn’t want to fly?

Question: With all the book tours in different countries you’ve done, have you met any interesting people or discovered a new place that might affect future writing, or that left a special impression on you?
J.K. Rowling responds: I have always loved traveling, but I can’t say that I have met anyone who has influenced the Harry books. You see, I planned them all so long ago before any of this happened to me.

Question: If you were Animagus, what kind of animal would you be?
J.K. Rowling responds: I’d like to be an otter — that’s my favourite animal. It would be depressing if I turned out to be a slug or something.

Question: Why did Harry have a pet owl instead of something else?
J.K. Rowling responds: Because owls are easily the coolest!

Question: How did you think of all the cool things that happened to Harry?
J.K. Rowling responds: Sometimes the ideas just come to me. Other times I have to sweat and almost bleed to make ideas come. It’s a mysterious process, but I hope I never find out exactly how it works. I like a mystery, as you may have noticed

Question: How would you like teachers to use your books with students (e.g. discussion, worksheets, book reports, etc.)?
J.K. Rowling responds: The teachers I have met who have used the books in the classroom have all done so very imaginatively. It’s been wonderful to see the work students have produced. I particularly enjoyed reading essays on what students think they would see in the Mirror of Erised. Very revealing!

Question: Friends are very important in your books. What do you think is the most important thing in friendship?
J.K. Rowling responds: Acceptance, I think, and loyalty. There are enough people in the world to give you a hard time. A friend is someone who gives unconditional support.

Question: Do you ever get writer’s block? What do you do when this happens?
J.K. Rowling responds: I’ve only suffered writer’s block badly once, and that was during the writing of Chamber of Secrets. I had my first burst of publicity about the first book and it paralysed me. I was scared the second book wouldn’t measure up, but I got through it!

Question: Do you have a favorite saying or motto?
J.K. Rowling responds: Draco dormiens numquam titallandus, of course.

Question: Do you have a favorite passage from one of your books?
J.K. Rowling responds: Hard to choose. I like chapter twelve of Sorcerer’s Stone (The Mirror of Erised), and I am proud of the ending of Goblet of Fire.

Question: How did you make the spells? Did you make them up, or are they real names of people and places?
J.K. Rowling responds: The spells are made up. I have met people who assure me, very seriously, that they are trying to do them, and I can assure them, just as seriously, that they don’t work.

Question: Are you going to write a book about other characters than Harry Potter?
J.K. Rowling responds: Yes, when I’ve finally finished all seven Harry Potter books, I will write something else.

Question: When you were a little girl, did you dream or ever think of Harry Potter or someone like him?
J.K. Rowling responds: Not really, though some of the fantasies I had as a child (like flying) are in the books.

Question: There are hundreds of rumours and theories going around about your books! Have you seen these, and do you plan to use any of the ideas found in them?
J.K. Rowling responds: No, I’m not using any of the ideas. To be honest, I avoid reading most of that stuff. Some of it is funny, some of it is weird, and some is just downright crazy.

Question: We’re doing a lot of writing at our school. At what age did you start writing, and did you love to write as a child?
J.K. Rowling responds: Yes, I loved writing as a child. I wrote my first “book” when I was six years old about a rabbit, called “Rabbit.

Question: What do you think about the movie? Do you think that it’ll destroy the adventure of the books?
J.K. Rowling responds: If I believed that, I wouldn’t have sold the film rights!

Question: What got you started writing? And how did you get your breakthrough to get the first book published?
J.K. Rowling responds: I’ve been writing since I was six. It is a compulsion, so I can’t really say where the desire came from — I’ve always had it. My breakthrough with the first book came through persistence, because a lot of publishers turned it down!

Question: Did you use the library a lot as a child?
J.K. Rowling responds: Yes, I loved the library, though I was very bad at returning books on time. I once ran up a bill at university of over fifty pounds in overdue fines, which was a lot of money to a struggling student. (It didn’t stop me doing it again though!)

Question: How did you come up with the idea of the underground chamber in Chamber of Secrets?
J.K. Rowling responds: I always knew the chamber was there. I don’t know what first gave me the idea; I just liked the thought that Slytherin had left something of himself behind.

Question: Are you having a lot of input on the new Harry Potter movie?
J.K. Rowling responds: I’ve been allowed a lot of input. They have been very generous in allowing me to make my opinions heard!

Question: What person from history has influenced you the most?
J.K. Rowling responds: Hmmmmm…..Well, my heroine (though she’s not really from “history”) was Jessica Mitford. I named my daughter after her. I found her inspiring because she was a brave and idealistic person — the qualities I most admire, in other words.

Question: Did you write another book before writing the Harry Potter series?
J.K. Rowling responds: Yes, I wrote (and almost finished) two novels for adults and a lot of short stories. I never finished the first two books because I realised in time that they were…very bad.

Question: How hard was it to pick the actors to play the characters in the movie?
J.K. Rowling responds: I didn’t pick them, so easy for me! But I think they are wonderful.

Question: Are the Harry Potter books being translated in other languages, like Portuguese/Brazil?
J.K. Rowling responds: The Harry books are available in Portuguese, both a Portuguese and a Brazilian version.

Question: How did you get the idea to send Harry to a wizard school?
J.K. Rowling responds: The idea as it first came to me was about a boy who didn’t know he was a wizard until he got his invitation to wizard school, so there was never a question that Harry would go anywhere else!

Question: Has the huge popularity of Harry Potter changed the direction of the plot in any way?
J.K. Rowling responds: No, not at all. People have asked me whether Rita Skeeter was invented for that purpose, but in fact she was always planned. I think I enjoyed writing her a bit more than I would have done if I hadn’t met a lot of journalists, though!

Question: Do wizards and witches have to go Muggle school before they go to Hogwarts?
J.K. Rowling responds: No, they don’t have to.

Question: How does the Dark Lord affect American wizards and witches?
J.K. Rowling responds: He affects everyone, but his plan is European domination first.

Question: Which house was Lily Potter in, and what is her maiden name?
J.K. Rowling responds: Her maiden name was Evans, and she was in Gryffindor (naturally).

Question: Did you write Harry Potter because you like fantasy books, or just because the idea came to you?
J.K. Rowling responds: The latter. In fact, I am not a great fan of fantasy books in general, and never read them!

Question: Do you imagine the pictures or images in your head before you write, or do you have to draw them?
J.K. Rowling responds: I imagine them very clearly and then attempt to describe what I can see. Sometimes I draw them for my own amusement!

Question: What grade and subject(s) did you teach?
J.K. Rowling responds: French, but it should have been English. I don’t know why I did French at university, except that my parents wanted me to. So learn from my mistake — do what you want, not what your parents want!

Question: I’m hooked! My son and I read them every night. Thank you so much for giving us this time to share something so wonderful together! He’s to be Harry for Halloween. We’d like to know how soon for the next book (like everyone else), but mostly just wanted to thank you for sharing Harry with us!
J.K. Rowling responds: That’s wonderful to hear, thank you. Well, book five is underway, but I don’t yet know when it will be available. It’ll be ready when it’s ready, is the best I can say!

Question: How do you write the really long books without getting bored?
J.K. Rowling responds: Oh dear…does that mean you get bored reading them?! I never get bored with the writing. I could (and often do) write all day and evening.

Question: Does Harry have a middle name?
J.K. Rowling responds: Yep, James after his dad.

Question: From where did you get the name for Harry Potter?
J.K. Rowling responds: ‘Harry’ has always been my favourite boy’s name, so if my daughter had been a son, he would have been Harry Rowling. Then I would have had to choose a different name for “Harry” in the books, because it would have been too cruel to name him after my own son. “Potter” was the surname of a family who used to live near me when I was seven years old and I always liked the name, so I borrowed it.

Question: Which book was the most fun for you to write?
J.K. Rowling responds: Prisoner of Azkaban, without a doubt. But that doesn’t necessarily mean it’s my favourite book. I love them all, but bizarrely the two that were most difficult to write, Chamber of Secrets and Goblet of Fire — are my favourites.

Question: Do you like being a writer?
J.K. Rowling responds: I love being a writer. I am very lucky my life’s ambition turned out to be just as much fun as I thought it would be.

Question: As an adult reader, I loved the books and was surprised at how much humour is in them. The Dursleys sound like something out of Monty Python! Do you like British comedy?
J.K. Rowling responds: British comedy is an obsession of mine. I love Monty Python.

Question: There are an extraordinary number of names that start with “H” (Harry, Hermione, Hedwig, Hogwarts, Hagrid, Hufflepuff). Is there any reason for that?
J.K. Rowling responds: Erm…no!

Question: Will you ever write an official autobiography?
J.K. Rowling responds: No, I don’t think so. My life is really very boring. You wouldn’t want to read about me cleaning out the rabbit cage!

Question: What is Bonfire Night?
J.K. Rowling responds: Good question! We celebrate November 5th in Britain every year. There was a plot to blow up the Houses of Parliament. The ringleader of the plot was called Guy Fawkes (spot any Harry Potter connection?!), and we burn him in effigy and set off fireworks to celebrate not losing our government.

Question: What did you want to be when you were a kid?
J.K. Rowling responds: A writer…always.

Question: What books do you read in your free reading time?
J.K. Rowling responds: Loads…usually novels and biographies.

Question: Harry Potter for grownups again! Is Voldemort the last remaining ancestor of Slytherin, or the last remaining descendent of Slytherin?
J.K. Rowling responds: Ah, you spotted the deliberate error. Yes, it should read “descendent.” That’s been changed in subsequent editions. (Keep hold of the “ancestor” one, maybe it’ll be valuable one day!)

Question: Will you ever include more illustrations?
J.K. Rowling responds: I don’t like too many illustrations in novels; I prefer to use my imagination about what people look like. So the answer is, probably not.

Question: What do you think of fan fiction being written about your characters, and have you read any of them on the Internet?
J.K. Rowling responds: I’ve read some of it. I find it very flattering that people love the characters that much.

Question: Is there something more to the cats appearing in the books than first meets the eye? (i.e. Mrs. Figg’s cats, Crookshanks, Prof. McGonagall as a cat, etc.)
J.K. Rowling responds: Ooooo, another good question. Let’s see what I can tell you without giving anything away….erm….no, can’t do it, sorry.

Question: If you could be a wizard, who would you be?
J.K. Rowling responds: If I were a character in the book, I’d probably be Hermione. She’s a lot like me when I was younger. (I wasn’t that clever but I was definitely that annoying at times!)

Question: When will the movie of Harry Potter be out?
J.K. Rowling responds: November 2001 was the last I heard!

Question: Ms. Rowling, in an article I read in Good Housekeeping, you stated that the character Hermione received her personality from her likeness of you at the age. What other things inspired you for other aspects or details in your books?
J.K. Rowling responds: Ron is a lot like my oldest friend, who is called Sean and with whom I went to school. I never intended Ron to be like Sean, but he turned out that way. Gilderoy Lockhart is also a lot like someone I once knew, but I don’t think I’d better elaborate!

Question: What is your favorite wizard candy?
J.K. Rowling responds: Chocolate frogs…I’d like to collect the cards!

Question: How did the Dursleys explain away the tail when Dudley had to have it removed at the hospital?
J.K. Rowling responds: They went to a private hospital where the staff was very discreet, and said that a wart had got out of control.

Question: How much control do you have on all of the products flooding the marketplace with a Harry Potter theme? Do you think they will sell well?
J.K. Rowling responds: Unless it’s a Warner Bros. product, it shouldn’t have Harry’s name on it at all, so I have no control and accept no responsibility! Warner Bros. has allowed me to have a say in merchandise relating to the film.

Question: Is it true that since Voldemort took Harry’s blood by force, that Harry can kill Voldemort, but Voldemort can’t kill Harry?
J.K. Rowling responds: It’s an interesting theory, but I wouldn’t trust it too much!

Question: Do you still have the napkins that you wrote the first book on?
J.K. Rowling responds: I’m giggling…where did you read that? I didn’t write on napkins; I wrote in notepads. We really need to squash this myth before people ask to see the used tea bags on which I drafted the first book!

Question: Is the Mrs. Figg with all the cats in the Dursleys’ neighborhood the same Arabella Figg that Dumbledore mentioned at the end of book 4?
J.K. Rowling responds: Well spotted!

Question: The Harry Potter series has lots of humorous moments. Do you consider yourself to be a really funny person?
J.K. Rowling responds: No, not really. I think I am funnier on paper than I am in person; the exact reverse of my sister who is very funny in person, but writes dull letters!

Question: Can you explain how Lupin turns into a werewolf, since he didn’t turn in the Shrieking Shack in Prisoner of Azkaban, but instead he turned only when the full moonlight hit him outside the tunnel? If he only turned into a wolf in the moonlight, why didn’t he just stay inside? Did it have to do with the potion? Or was the moon not up yet?
J.K. Rowling responds: The moon wasn’t up when he entered the Shrieking Shack.

Question: As the author, when reading your books, can you enjoy them as a reader and sympathize with Harry, or is it too hard to be “objective”?
J.K. Rowling responds: Too hard to be objective. When I re-read the books, I often catch myself re-editing them. It’s an uncomfortable experience. However, the more time elapses, the less I find myself doing that — I can now read Sorcerer’s Stone fairly comfortably.

Question: How many students attend Hogwarts, and how many students per year per house?
J.K. Rowling responds: There are about a thousand students at Hogwarts.

Question: Did you ever make a study of herbs and other Hogwarts subjects, or did you create all those classes from inspiration?
J.K. Rowling responds: Most of the magic is made up. Occasionally I will use something that people used to believe was true — for example, the “Hand of Glory” which Draco gets from Borgin and Burkes in Chamber of Secrets.

Question: You said Ron’s cousin was taken out of Book 4, and you developed Rita Skeeter more after that. Do you still think that it would have been more fun to keep her? Can you tell me anything about what she was going to be like?
J.K. Rowling responds: Well, maybe I will use her in another book, so I don’t want to talk about her too much. I had never “killed” a character before (in either sense) until Goblet of Fire, so that made writing the book a little more stressful!

Question: Why was a different cover illustration chosen for the books sold in the United States? Why do those books have illustrations at the beginning of each chapter but the British books do not?
J.K. Rowling responds: Publishers choose to do things differently, and I’m glad about that. It’s very exciting for authors to see their work in many different versions. I love the look of the American books, especially the chapter illustrations.

Question: In the second book, Harry and Ron went to the girls’ toilet and met McGonagall. They told her that they were going to visit Hermione, and she started crying. Why?
J.K. Rowling responds: She found it very touching that Harry and Ron were missing Hermione so badly (or so she thought). Under that gruff exterior, Professor McGonagall is a bit of an old softy, really.

Question: How old is old in the wizarding world, and how old are Professors Dumbledore and McGonagall?
J.K. Rowling responds: Dumbledore is a hundred and fifty, and Professor McGonagall is a sprightly seventy. Wizards have a much longer life expectancy than Muggles. (Harry hasn’t found out about that yet.)

Question: How does the wizarding world protect Muggle banks and vaults, etc. from wizards apparating into them and stealing the contents?
J.K. Rowling responds: Well, the Ministry of Magic keeps tabs on people apparating. That’s why you have to have a license to do it, and the moment you abuse it you can find yourself in serious trouble (or Azkaban!).

Question: What position did James play on the Gryffindor Quidditch team? Was it seeker like Harry, or something different?
J.K. Rowling responds: James was Chaser.

Question: How painful is the editing process for you? Compared with writing a first draft, how long do you spend editing? Who do you conference with?
J.K. Rowling responds: I work with my editors. I enjoy the editing process, but I edit fairly extensively myself before my editors get to see the book, so it’s never a very long job.

Question: Are you writing all the books at the same time, like in little pieces, while concentrating mostly on the present one, or do you just have a general idea about them?
J.K. Rowling responds: During the first five years that I was writing the series, I made plans and wrote small pieces of all the books. I concentrate on one book at a time, though occasionally I will get an idea for a future book and scribble it down for future reference.

Question: Any plans for a video game soon?
J.K. Rowling responds: I think there probably will be a video game, but when, I have no idea.

Question: Do you think elementary-age children will be able to read the other three books in the series?
J.K. Rowling responds: Yes, I do. I personally feel the books are suitable for people aged 8 years and over. Though my daughter, who is seven, has read them all and not been very frightened — but maybe she’s tough, like her mother!

Question: When you are not writing or reading, what things do you enjoy in your free time?
J.K. Rowling responds: Let’s see…..when I’m not reading, writing or spending time with my daughter, there isn’t much time left over, but I like travelling most.

Question: Some sets on the movies are already being created. Do you think they represent how you envisioned them in the book? Have you had any input on the shooting locations?
J.K. Rowling responds: I know they look as I imagined them (those that have been done so far)!

Question: Hello, I was wondering how much Tolkien inspired and influenced your writing?
J.K. Rowling responds: Hard to say. I didn’t read The Hobbit until after the first Harry book was written, though I read Lord of the Rings when I was nineteen. I think, setting aside the obvious fact that we both use myth and legend, that the similarities are fairly superficial. Tolkien created a whole new mythology, which I would never claim to have done. On the other hand, I think I have better jokes.

Question: Ms. Rowling, for being fictional books, the Harry Potter books have a great grasp of the Latin language. I have noticed that many, if not most, of the names and incantations are of Latin heritage. How much research does it take to give these books their Latin heritage?
J.K. Rowling responds: My Latin, such as it is, is self-taught. I enjoy feeling that wizards would continue to use this dead language in their everyday life.

Question: Will you have a cameo in the Harry Potter movie?
J.K. Rowling responds: No, definitely not. I hate watching myself on-screen!

Question: If there were one thing you could change about the world, what would it be?
J.K. Rowling responds: I would make each and every one of us much more tolerant.

Question: Do any of the things that happen in the Harry Potter books reflect any of your childhood fantasies?
J.K. Rowling responds: Flying, definitely. And who wouldn’t want to be able to use the Jelly-Legs Curse?

Question: Why did you choose the owl as the animal messenger in your books?
J.K. Rowling responds: Owls are traditionally associated with magic, and I like them.

Question: Our thanks to J.K. Rowling for joining us today. Any thoughts you would like to leave us with?
J.K. Rowling responds: Keep reading! (And it doesn’t have to be Harry Potter!)

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O Trovão de Rowling

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Traduzido: carolsalgueiro e Adriana Snape
Revisado: {patylda}
*OK Categorias e Conteúdo

Jensen, Jeff. “Rowling Thunder (parts 1 & 2),” Entertainment Weekly, August 4, 2000

As HARRY POTTER AND THE GOBLET OF FIRE takes the express track to bestsellerdom, J.K. ROWLING explains why writing it was such a challenge–though she’s far from running out of steam

PART ONE

On a normal day, the train is called the Queen of Scots. Today, it is called the Hogwarts Express, the train that transports Harry Potter to the Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, and right now it is at a station in Perth, 90 minutes outside Edinburgh, Scotland. Cottony clouds of steam are billowing out of its engine, a quaint little spectacle for the hundreds of children waiting behind a makeshift gate numbered 9 1/2. It would all be very cute, except for the shrieking that accompanies all that hot air, a piercing and ever- intensifying whistle that is causing the entire crowd to cover their ears, everyone eyeballing that infernal engine, wondering if it’s ever going to stop.

And then it does.

And a door opens.

Inside, on this, her last stop in a steam-powered barnstorm of the U.K. in support of Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth in her series of books about a most extraordinary young wizard, J.K. Rowling, 35, sits on the edge of a table, greeting a lucky bunch of kids, their faces stony and bloodless from nervous excitement. “Hello, contest winner,” says the mock monarch with the dirty-blond hair and blue jeans, her warm smirk packed with affection for these, her subjects. The attendants from Bloomsbury Publishing get one of them to pose for a picture with her. “Now,” Rowling says conspiratorially, signing his book, “pretend like you’re thrilled to see me.”

He doesn’t need to pretend. But it’s all she can do to pretend that none of this is as deliriously mind-boggling as it really is. As she says during a 60-minute chat en route from Edinburgh to Perth, “You could go crazy thinking about it too much.”

How did you feel about all the marketing hoopla around Goblet?

The marketing was literally “Don’t give out the book.” And it wasn’t even a marketing ploy. It came from me. This book was the culmination of 10 years’ work, and something very big in terms of my ongoing plot happens at the end, and it rounds off an era; the remaining three books are a different era in Harry’s life. Had that got out, there’s no way the book would have been as enjoyable to read.

You sat on the title for a long time, too.

The title thing was for a much more prosaic reason: I changed my mind twice on what it was. The working title had got out–Harry Potter and the Doomspell Tournament. Then I changed Doomspell to Triwizard Tournament. Then I was teetering between Goblet of Fire and Triwizard Tournament. In the end, I preferred Goblet of Fire because it’s got that kind of “cup of destiny” feel about it, which is the theme of the book.

Was this the hardest book you’ve had to write so far?

Easily.

Why?

The first three books, my plan never failed me. But I should have put that plot under a microscope. I wrote what I thought was half the book, and “Ack!” Huge gaping hole in the middle of the plot. I missed my deadline by two months. And the whole profile of the books got so much higher since the third book; there was an edge of external pressure.

And what exactly was that gaping hole all about?

I had to pull a character. There you go: “the phantom character of Harry Potter.” She was a Weasley cousin [related to Ron Weasley, Harry’s best friend]. She served the same function that Rita Skeeter [a sleazy investigative journalist] now serves. Rita was always going to be in the book, but I built her up, because I needed a kind of conduit for information outside the school. Originally, this girl fulfilled this purpose.

Does sleazy Rita reflect how you feel about the media?

No, but when I got to the point in the writing where I had to introduce Rita, I did hesitate, because I thought, People will think this is my response to what’s happened to me. But I had a lot more fun writing Rita then I think I would have done if it hadn’t happened to me. Rita will be back.

The size of this book–734 pages. Nearly twice as long as the longest book you’ve written.

What is she doing?

Exactly. Please explain.

I knew from the beginning it would be the biggest of the first four. You need a proper run-up to what happens at the end. It’s a complex plot, and you don’t rush a plot that complex, because everyone’s gonna get confused.

This book is quite the wide-screen epic, with the Quidditch World Cup, the arrival of rival schools, the Triwizard Tournament, the ending battle…

Everything is on a bigger scale.

Intentional?

Yes. It’s symbolic. Harry’s horizons are literally and metaphorically widening as he grows older. But also there are places in the world that I’ve been planning for so long and thinking about for so long that we haven’t yet explored, and it’s great fun. That will happen in book 5, too; we go into a whole new area, physically, an area you’ve never seen before, a magical world.

Will we ever see Harry in America?

Unlikely. The battleground is Britain at the moment. I got asked the other day, “Given the huge success of your books in America, are you going to be introducing American characters?” And I thought, You’re an idiot. I am not about to throw away 10 years’ meticulous planning in the hope that I will buck up to a few more readers. American kids have no need to see a token American character. This is another instance of people grossly underestimating children.

One of Goblet’s biggest themes is bigotry. It’s always been in your books, with the Hitlerlike Lord Voldemort and his followers prejudiced against Muggles (nonmagical people). In book 4, Hermione tries to liberate the school’s worker elves, who’ve been indentured servants so long they lack desire for anything else. Why did you want to explore these themes?

Because bigotry is probably the thing I detest most. All forms of intolerance, the whole idea of “that which is different from me is necessary evil.” I really like to explore the idea that difference is equal and good. But there’s another idea that I like to explore, too. Oppressed groups are not, generally speaking, people who stand firmly together–no, sadly, they kind of subdivide among themselves and fight like hell. That’s human nature, so that’s what you see here. This world of wizards and witches, they’re already ostracized, and then within themselves, they’ve formed a loathsome pecking order.

You don’t think this a little heavy for kids?

These are things that a huge number of children at that age start to think about. It’s really fun to write about it, but in a very allegorical way.

Do the books reflect your own political sensibilities? In America, some might say you’re a bit left-wing.

It’s absolutely the reverse to the British press; I was told yesterday that I’m a Euroskeptic, which is a big buzzword in Britain. I actually woke up at 2 a.m. this morning, went into the kitchen to get some water, and thought, “I know why they said that–they haven’t finished the book.” Right at the end, Dumbledore says, “Differences of habit and language are nothing at all if our aims are identical and our hearts are open.” That is my view. It is very inclusive, and yes, you are right: I am left-wing.

But are you baking your political beliefs into these books, or are we just reading stuff into them?

There is a certain amount of political stuff in there. But I also feel that every reader will bring his own agenda to the book. People who send their children to boarding schools seem to feel that I’m on their side. I’m not. Practicing wiccans think I’m also a witch. I’m not.

PART TWO

Once she was a struggling single mom, sneaking off to cafes to write after putting her daughter to bed. Now, with Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth book in her seven-volume epic about the titular boy wizard, J.K. Rowling finds herself guardian of an international pop phenom and a mythic world that’s bucking to be called Tolkienesque. And yet the more things change–and they have, from the full-time assistant she recently hired to keep her organized, to the hagglings with Hollywood over the forthcoming deluge of merchandise and movies–the more things stay the same. She’s still sneaking off to corner cafes in Edinburgh, Scotland, seeking solitude to write. “It feels incredibly familiar, actually,” says Rowling, “as though I’m right back where I was before Harry Potter [and the Sorcerer’s Stone].”

You referred to the darkness in your books, and there’s been a lot of talk and even concern over that.

You have a choice when you’re going to introduce a very evil character. You can dress a guy up with loads of ammunition, put a black Stetson on him, and say, “Bad guy. Shoot him.” I’m writing about shades of evil. You have Voldemort, a raging psychopath, devoid of the normal human responses to other people’s suffering, and there are people like that in the world. But then you have Wormtail, who out of cowardice will stand in the shadow of the strongest person. What’s very important for me is when Dumbledore says that you have to choose between what is right and what is easy. This is the setup for the next three books. All of them are going to have to choose, because what is easy is often not right.

There’s a scene in Goblet where Cedric, who competes against Harry in the Triwizard Tournament, is killed by Voldemort, and at the end, Dumbledore must choose between informing the students of this evil, or keeping the knowledge from them. He chooses to tell them.

Dumbledore’s decision is 100 percent me. It would have been an insult to that boy’s memory not to tell the truth. But telling the truth has repercussions. People aren’t used to the truth, particularly from fixtures of authority. I hated killing Cedric, by the way, just hated it.

There’s some other horrific violence, too, like when Wormtail cuts up Harry’s arm to get the blood to bring Voldemort back to life. Very disturbing.

Yeah, that wasn’t good, I agree with you.

Have you ever thought “Maybe I should tone it down”?

No. I know that sounds kind of brutal but no, I haven’t. The bottom line is, I have to write the story I want to write. I never wrote them with a focus group of 8-year-olds in mind. I have to continue telling the story the way I want to tell it. I don’t at all relish the idea of children in tears, and I absolutely don’t deny it’s frightening. But it’s supposed to be frightening! And if you don’t show how scary that is, you cannot show how incredibly brave Harry is. He’s really brave, and he does, I think, one of his bravest things in this book: He can’t save Cedric, but he wants to save Cedric’s parents additional pain. He wants to bring back the body and treat it with respect.

Saving Cedric’s body reminded me of the Hector-Patroclus-Achilles triangle in the Iliad.

That’s where it came from. That really, really, really moved me when I read that when I was 19. The idea of the desecration of a body, a very ancient idea…I was thinking of that when Harry saved Cedric’s body.

And then you go and emotionally decimate your readers with that scene where Harry’s murdered parents are drawn out of Voldemort’s wand. I was in tears.

Me too. It was the first time I cried writing a Harry Potter book. I got pretty upset.

As your fan base is growing larger, and maybe even younger, do you feel any sense of social responsibility, any sense of responsibilities to their sensibilities?

I cannot write to please other people. I can’t. When I finish book 7, I want to be able to look in the mirror and think, I did it the way I meant to do it. If I lose readers in the process, I’m not going to throw a party about it. But I would feel far worse if I knew that I had allowed myself to write something different. Yet, I do have parents coming up to me and saying “He’s 6 and he loved your book!” And I’ve always kind of been, “Well, that’s great, but I know what’s coming, and I think 6 is a tiny bit too young.” I’ve always felt that. With my daughter and Goblet of Fire, I’m reading it to her. Her reading age is pretty advanced, but I said, “I’m gonna read that one to you. It’s scary, and I want to be there with you, and then we can talk about it.” That would be my feeling if parents feel that.

What does your daughter [Jessica, 7] think of Harry Potter?

I always said I’d never read her the books until she was 7, and I think even 7 is pushing it. But I broke the rules. I actually read to her when she was 6. She started school, see, and kids were asking her about Quidditch and things. She didn’t have an idea what they were all about, and I just thought, “I’m excluding her from this huge part of my life, and it’s making her an outsider.” So I read them to her, and she became completely Harry Potter-obsessed!

Does Jessica have the inside scoop on what’s going to happen?

No no no no no! And kids at her school will sidle up to me and say, “Does Jessica know what happens in book 4? Does Jessica know the title of book 4?” And I keep saying, “No! There is no point kidnapping her, taking her around back of the bike shed, and torturing her for information.”

You are transitioning from overnight success story to caretaker to a mythic world, one that’s about to get translated into movies and merchandise. How do you feel about that?

It is worrying. I am nervous. Because I’m fighting tooth and nail- -and people have to believe me on that, because it is the truth–I am fighting to maintain the purity of the world. That’s what I’m involved with at the moment, trying to make sure that when things go out with the name Harry Potter on them, they really are Harry Potter things, not some pale imitation.

Do you have kind of control over what Warner Bros. does with Harry Potter?

Can I prevent it in terms of what’s in my contract? No. But they have been very gracious in allowing me input, and I have been asked a lot of questions I never expect to be asked.

What’s it been like, dealing with Hollywood?

The person I was most nervous about meeting by far was Steve Kloves, who’s writing the screenplay. I was really ready to hate [him]. This was the man who was gonna butcher my baby. The first time I met him, he said, “You know who my favorite character is?” And I thought, “You’re gonna say Ron.” It’s real easy to love Ron–but so obvious. But he said “Hermione.” I just kind of melted.

Are there any plans to come to the U.S.?

I am likely to be over there later this year. I love going to the States.

What do you like about the States?

Well, what don’t I like about it? I really, really, really fell in love with New York. The first signing I did over there, the first boy to reach me in the queue put out his hand and went “YOU ROCK!” I thought that was great, but I heard myself respond and I sounded so intensely British, something like “That’s very nice of you to say so, thank you so much.” Then there was this woman in L.A., a middle-aged sort of Palm Beach-type woman, she said, “I AM SO GLAD YOU’RE RICH!” I’m telling you, you’d never hear that in Britain. Here, it’s “Well done.”

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