McAllister, J.F.O. and Chu, Jeff. “A Feiticeira Tímida”. Time Magazine, 23 de junho de 2003. Nem mesmo uma década atrás ela era desconhecida e pobre, uma mãe solteira vivendo da assistência social e que, às vezes,...
consulte Mais informação“Bate-papo com J.K. Rowling no Dia Mundial do Livro”. 4 de março de 2004. J.K. Rowling diz: Olá pra todos, estou aqui ao vivo e pronta para responder todas as suas dúvidas! Bobby: Alguma idéia para uma série sobre o...
consulte Mais informaçãoKhalik, Abdul. “A mais recente edição de Potter cria histeria entre os fãs”. Jakarta Post, 12 de janeiro de 2004. Houve uma estranha visão em Jakarta da meia noite de sábado até as primeiras horas da manhã de domingo: dezenas de...
consulte Mais informaçãoTradução: Ronnie
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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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Fry, Stephen, interviewer: J.K. Rowling at the Royal Albert Hall, 26 June 2003.
Transcription by MSN.com
Harry Potter and the Magic of the Internet
JK Rowling Webcast on MSN featuring your questions on text and video from around the world June 26th 2003
The webcast was produced by MSN with Bloomsbury, Clear Channel and Initial an Endemol Company with BT Broadband in the UK and Scholastic in the US.
The webcast started with some pre-recorded interviews from outside the venue with children who had been waiting all morning. JK Rowling arrived to huge cheers.
JK Rowling paused to sign autographs while the crowds were being entertained by magicians and jugglers and even a tea-lady on stilts. Inside the Hall they sang a version of the Hogwarts School Song.
At 4.09 exactly we cut live to the show happening inside the Royal Albert Hall. The stage set is a common room at Hogwarts with a fireplace surrounded by framed pictures and a huge moon suspended from the ceiling.
There are giant screens on either side of the stage for video questions filmed by MSN from around the world.
Assistant Caretaker: J K Rowling is here everybody! She’s in the building! Ooh! Ooh! I’m so excited. I’m very, very excited. Hey! Hold on, hold on! I bet some of you are literally bursting with excitement. Oh no! Not literally, not literally – I’ve got enough mess to clear up. Hey! I’ve got to get moving. Let’s get this place ship-shape, she’ll be here.
FX: Eerie noise.
Ooh someone’s coming. Come on you guys look lively, smarten up because She’ll be here soon. I’d better poke the fire. There we go. Ooh! Hey that noise you just heard means there’s a magic portal opening up and we have Muggles from all over the world joining us. Hello, welcome to our show. You’re in for a big, big treat. Oh yes you are!
In a moment we shall meet “She who shall be named†with “He who shall ask the questions†and his name is…he is a marvellous Muggle, called Stephen Fry, who you will know is the voice of the Harry Potter books and he’s here, yes, right now!
Enjoy the show everybody! Goodbye!
FX: Explosion and puff of smoke as Stephen Fry comes out of the fireplace.
Stephen Fry: Oh dear me. Hello! Hello there! Hello, am I in the right place? It’s a long time since I’ve used floo powder and I sometimes end up in the wrong place. Is this the Royal Albert Hall?
Audience: YESSSSS!
Stephen Fry: Good. Now most of you might know why we are here. Have you see an assistant caretaker anywhere? He was supposed to be welcoming me here. With any luck he might have been fired. We are here to meet the most famous and the most popular writer in the whole wide world!
Audience: Cheers
Stephen Fry: Now I have to ask you a question. Are you ready to meet her?
Audience: YESSSS!
Stephen Fry: In that case, let me welcome onto this stage boys and girls, ladies and gentlemen J K ROWLING
Audience: Very very loud CHEERS!
JK Rowling: Hello. Oh Wow!
Stephen Fry: How about that?
JK Rowling: That’s amazing.
Stephen Fry: Shall we go and sit down. There are some questions to ask you. You pop there. Now, as you may know everybody, we are webcasting around the planet and many people have lots of questions to ask
JK Rowling: Good good
Stephen Fry: I have one to start with… what am I going to call you?
JK Rowling: Jo
Stephen Fry: Jo?
JK Rowling: Yes
Stephen Fry: Can we settle a really important question? How do you pronounce your last name?
JK Rowling: It is Rowling – as in rolling pin.
Stephen Fry: Rolling! You now all have to say after me, the word “rolling†boys and girls, 1…2…3…
Audience: ROLLING!
Stephen Fry: If you hear anybody in the future say JK “Row-elling†you have my permission to hit them on the head – not with a copy of the Order of the Phoenix because that would be cruel
JK Rowling: That would kill them )
Stephen Fry: No use something smaller than the last book – like a fridge.
JK Rowling (laughs)
Stephen Fry: We’ve got lots of questions to get through so let’s hear our first question which is from a young man not too far away. He’s in Stevenage in Hertfordshire and his name is James Williams.
What kind of books did you read when you were a child? Did it inspire you to become a writer?
JK Rowling: That’s a very good question, a very intelligent question. I would read absolutely anything at all. My favourite writers were E. Nesbit… I liked C.S. Lewis, and I used to read adult writers as well. I would read absolutely anything: the backs of cereal packets – anything.
Stephen Fry: Are you one of those people that can’t eat breakfast cereal without reading the packet?
JK Rowling: I am indeed one of those people.
Stephen Fry: I’m the same. I go mad if I have to eat cereal and there’s no packet anywhere )
One of the things I suppose a lot of people always like to know about writers, is the very basic question of what your average writing day is like. Now I’m sure there’s no average writing day. It’s a silly question or may sound silly to you, but people always love to know them… like: Do you use computer or do you write with a pen? Do you drink coffee or tea? Do you listen to music when you write? Those sorts of things. Can you give us a rough example of a day?
JK Rowling: My favourite way to write used to be to go to cafes. I used to love doing that because I find being surrounded by people, even though I can’t talk to them while I’m writing, is very helpful. Being a writer is a very, very lonely job obviously, but these days I can’t write in cafes because too many people come up to me and say “Are you that woman that writes that Harry Potter� So I write at home now – and I write much more on the computer than I used do
Stephen Fry: Do you listen to music when you’re writing?
JK Rowling: I never listen to music when I’m writing – I find music much too distracting
Stephen Fry: Do you drink tea or coffee?
JK Rowling: I drink both of them – in excessive quantities
Stephen Fry: Just to be really dull. Do you start very early and write till very late? Is it regular?
JK Rowling: I start after I have taken my daughter to school and I keep writing till I’m so hungry I can’t focus on the computer any more – then I go and have sandwich then write till Jessica comes home from school then sometimes I’ll do a bit in the evening.
Stephen Fry: and after about a year or so …
JK Rowling: and after a year or so you finally think “Ooh I’ve finished the bookâ€
Stephen Fry: Do you print it out as you go along and read it on paper?
JK Rowling: I do, yes – waste a lot of paper
Stephen Fry: Good well. Those are the details out of the way
Question from Anna Beatrice de Curia Pierera, Rio de Janeiro in Brazil
On video: “Did you find it harder to write now that the whole world is eagerly waiting for the launching of the new Harry Potter book in the series?â€
JK Rowling: Umm, I don’t think I did find it harder to write but it can get a little bit scary being published these days. Look where we are! The first reading I ever did; there were two people who’d wandered into the basement of Waterstone’s (UK Book Store) by mistake and were too polite to leave when they saw someone was going a reading and they had to get all the staff in the shop downstairs to bulk out the crowd a bit. I was terrified. I was shaking so badly.
Stephen Fry: Now when you go to a book shop to do a signing people dress up – don’t they…
JK Rowling: They do. Best one I ever saw was one woman in America who dressed up as the fat lady in pink dress and she’d hung a picture frame around herself. She looked fabulous.
Stephen Fry: How wonderful! Particularly in America where they’re more perhaps theatrical than we are about these things – you get boys dressed as Harry and girls as Hermione?
JK Rowling: Many boys dressed as Harry. Lately I’ve noticed people like dressing up as Draco a lot more, which I’m finding a little bit worrying. You’re all getting far too fond of Draco )
Stephen Fry: The dark forces are rising Jo )
JK Rowling: The dark forces are indeed rising!
Stephen Fry: There’s no question about it! Now to Manchester where there is a question from Jess Wilde:
On video: “What advice would you give to any kids who want to become authors?â€
Stephen Fry: Now Jess is of course is a name you like…
JK Rowling: My daughter is called Jessica. I always say the same thing – which is to read as much you possibly can. Nothing will help you as much as reading. Then you’ll go through a phase and imitate your favourite authors and that’s fine – that’s a learning experience too and you are also going to have to accept that you’re going to hate a lot of things you write before you find you like something.
Stephen Fry: There seem to be lots of popular children’s authors around at the moment. Philip Pullman…do you like him?
JK Rowling: Philip Pullman is fantastic. David Almond, Jacqueline Wilson.
Stephen Fry: Lemony Snicket. I like that – I wish I were called Lemony Snicket.
JK Rowling: What a name- I would love to be called Lemony Snicket.
Stephen Fry: Almost better than being called Mundungus.
JK Rowling: Almost…. You know what Mundungus means? Mundungus is an old word for tobacco because, Mundungus’s always smelling of his pipe and other various unsavoury things so that’s why he called Mundungus.
Stephen Fry: I didn’t know that. There we’ve learnt…
Stephen Fry: Now let’s go 6000 miles to Lily Rodseth in Seattle USA.
Video: Which character do you miss most when you finish writing a book?
JK Rowling: I really miss all of them but I suppose I’m going to have to say Harry because you know he is my hero and there’s a lot of me in Harry.
Stephen Fry: People ask me in the reading of them who my favourite character is and I always say Harry. You didn’t choose to make ‘Anyone else’ and the Philosophers Stone or ‘Anyone Else’ and the Chamber of Secrets – its Harry’s story and Harry’s growth as a person.
JK Rowling: It’s Harry’s journey. Harry is the eyes through which you see the world so he’s crucial to the story.
Stephen Fry: Can you remind us how it all popped into your head, almost fully formed?
JK Rowling: I was on a train going from Manchester to London, looking out of window at cows and I just thought “boy doesn’t know he’s a wizard goes off to wizard schoolâ€. I have no idea where it came from. The idea were just floating along the train and looking for someone and my mind was vacant enough and so it decided to zoom in there.
Stephen Fry: You played with the idea in your head?
JK Rowling: Exactly. From that moment I thought “Why doesn’t he know he’s a wizard?†It was as though the story was just there for me to discover. His parents are dead he needs to find out they’re wizards and on we went from there.
Stephen Fry: And the names I have to mention the names, you mentioned Mundungus being tobacco…. A lot of the names have very particular meanings; Albus Dumbledore is on the side of light his name means “white†in Latin. Alba was an old name for Britain.
JK Rowling: It also means wisdom in Latin.
Stephen Fry: Yes, “Alb†– What about Malfoy? What does that mean?
JK Rowling: Malfoy is a made-up name but you could say it was old French for bad faith. It really suits him.
Stephen Fry: Bad Faith…Malfoy…perfect isn’t it. I’m sure the boys and girls nave noticed that the Hogwarts School motto is Latin and what is it?
JK Rowling: Well, you’re one of the few people I’ve met who knew what it meant “Never tickle a sleeping dragonâ€.
Stephen Fry: There never tickle a sleeping dragon, probably the wisest advice you will ever hear. Its good advice
Stephen Fry: It’s like the magic equivalent of “let sleeping dogs lieâ€
JK Rowling: Exactly!
Question from Neil Sierra Sidney Australia
Video: “Have you ever considered writing a book about Harry 5 or 10 years later – after he’s left Hogwarts?â€
JK Rowling: I get asked this question about whether I’m going to write about Harry when he’s grown up. I always say “You’ll have to wait and see whether he survives to be a grown upâ€
Stephen Fry: Uhn..that’s a frightening thought…isn’t it my goodness!
JK Rowling: Sorry. I’m not saying he won’t but I don’t want to give anything away at this point.
Stephen Fry: He is growing up of course and it’s intriguing about reading these books to watch him and his friends – age. Which do you think he’d fine the more difficult – to fight Voldemort – You’ve got to be able to say it or he’ll have too much power over you to fight Voldemort – or to kiss Cho?
JK Rowling: People who’ve read the Order of the Phoenix will have a fairly shrewd idea of what the answer might be…
Stephen Fry: Were not going to give away too much about the book because not everyone can read that fast. I could read a few telephone directories in a week but not that book. Another thing about the ageing (of the characters growing up) I feel. If you look back now at the first and second books, they almost seem innocent by comparison – they had monsters, they had real villains, everything now is more complicated isn’t it …
JK Rowling: Yes, very much so.
Stephen Fry: They are. Everything is more complicated now as Harry gets older. When he entered the wizard-ing world after a horrible time at the Dursleys he expected Wonderland. He almost immediately he wandered into Draco Malfoy and found out that some wizards are racists. Slowly but surely he found out many people in power in the wizarding world are just as nasty and corrupt as in our world.
JK Rowling: That’s because it’s about human nature and people with less pure motives have wands too. A lot of time is trying to legislate for them.
Stephen Fry: Exactly, politicians and journalists. It’s also true in the real world. People say we haven’t got a magic wand to cure all ills of the world but what you show is that even if you have got a magic wand it doesn’t cure all the ills.
Another question now from Daniel Joseph, Croydon (UK)
Video “How do you decide what the baddies would be like?â€
JK Rowling: This is going to sound awful but I’ve met enough people I didn’t like in my life to have a fairly shrewd idea of what I want baddies to be like. I think from letters I get from people your age that nearly all of you here knows a Draco Malfoy and girls will almost certainly know a Pansy Parkinson. We all grow up with those sort of people and certainly as adults we’ve all have met people like Lucius Malfoy and some of the other characters.
Stephen Fry: Malfoy, Goyle and Crabbe are almost irredeemably bad – certainly there’s almost nothing attractive about about Goyle and Crabbe, repulsive – Malfoy is reasonably stylish…
JK Rowling: Malfoy is certainly stylish in the film –
Stephen Fry: Yes, and even in the books there is a certain flair. Most characters like Snape are hard to love but there is a sort of ambiguity – you can’t quite decide – something sad about him – lonely and it’s fascinating when you think he’s going to be the evil one a party from Voldemort obviously in the first book then slowly you get this idea he’s not so bad after all.
JK Rowling: Yes but you shouldn’t think him too nice. It is worth keeping an eye on old Severus definitely!
Stephen Fry: Why does Dumbledore …(simplifies) one of the most awful things in the world when we are young, is injustice – when something’s unfair it makes us so angry. One of the things is I get upset on Harry’s behalf about how people tell lies about him. We know he’s brave and actually saved the magical world on numerous occasions, yet he has to start all over again in each book and do all over again and prove himself again. Dumbledore knows how good he is and how bad the fathers of Deatheaters, Crabbe and Goyle are.
JK Rowling: I don’t want to say too much but Dumbledore is a very wise man who knows that Harry is going to have to learn a few hard lessons to prepare him for what may be coming in his life. He allows Harry to get into what he wouldn’t allow another pupil to do and he also unwillingly permits Harry to confront things he’d rather protect him from. As people who’ve read the Order of The Phoenix will know; Dumbledore has had to step back from Harry to teach him some of life’s harder lessons.
Stephen Fry: You have to push you’re beloved chickens out of the nest so they can fly
Q from Hong Kong – China Korea International School
Video: “Do you believe in magic?â€
Stephen Fry: Well there’s a good question, do you believe in magic?
JK Rowling: I’m sorry to say, because often when I answer this question I get a groan, that I don’t believe in magic.
Groan from the audience
JK Rowling: I really don’t in magic the way that it appears in book. I could be slightly corny and say I do believe in other kinds of magic; the magic of the imagination for example, and love, but magic as in waving a wand – no. I’d love to believe in it but I’m afraid I can’t.
Stephen Fry: But it doesn’t matter that it sounds corny … it’s desperately important that the way Harry solves all his problems is really through his courage, his friendship, and his loyalty and stoutness of heart.
JK Rowling: “Stoutness of heart†– is a very good phrase!â€
Harry is not a good enough wizard yet to even attempt to take on Voldemort as wizard to wizard. He’s escaped him three, four times if you count the encounter with Tom Riddle. He keeps doing it because there is one thing that Voldemort doesn’t understand and that’s the power that keeps Harry going. And we all know what that power is.
Stephen Fry: Exactly right we now have Natasha Rye, Suffolk
Video “If you could have any magical power for one day what would you have and how would you use it?â€
JK Rowling: If I could have a power, I would have the power of invisibility and, it is a little bit sad, but I’d probably sneak off to a café and write all day.
Stephen Fry: I’m just thinking of all the wicked things I would do if I were invisible and they wouldn’t include writing!
JK Rowling I’ve just been asked, on my way here I was asked for the first time when book 6 will be ready so I think you’ll agree I’d better get working soon.
Stephen Fry: It can’t be soon enough for any of us.
Q from Paris, France: Antoine De Dan (in French)
Video: “If you looked into the Mirror of Erised what do you think you would see?â€
Stephen Fry: The Mirror of Erised is as everyone knows …what is Erised spelt backwards?
Audience: Desire!
Stephen Fry: Desire spelt backwards.
JK Rowling – Very good. I would, at the moment, probably see myself very much as I am because one of the most wonderful things that could possibly have happened has happened and I’ve had another child – myself and family. I’d also like to see what Harry sees – my mother alive again. There’d be room over my shoulder to see a scientist inventing a cigarette that would be healthy, that would be lovely and I can think of a particular journalist being boiled in oil.
Stephen Fry: If your first book had been a reasonable success and your second book ok too so a few people would have heard your name, and they might have just done well enough, do you think the stories would have developed in different ways? Has some element of the huge and unparalleled fame and success you’ve had, has given you different view of the world and affected the way the books developed?
JK Rowling Mmmm yes that had entered the story. I think that I always thought Harry would feel the pressure of his position both as famous wizard – as in the first book when he enters, you do see that when he walked into the Leaky Cauldron for the first time and he’s stunned that people have been talking about him for eleven years without his knowledge – and I always knew he would meet someone from the Daily Prophet. I think it would be foolish to pretend I don’t write Rita Skeeter with a little more enjoyment these days. I try and avoid reading about myself..
And now here is a question from Amit Ben David from Roshon Israel
Video “What music does Harry Potter listen to?â€
JK Rowling That’s a very good question. Well..He has recently heard the wizard super group the Weird Sisters who came to the Yule Ball who had an odd assortment of instruments: bagpipes, cello, and the electric guitar of course so I’d have to say they are his favourite group.
Stephen Fry: Is there no Wizard Rap or House or Hip Hop in the wizard world?
JK Rowling That would have got to be too complicated. He’s sticking with the Weird Sisters and you can make of them what you will.
Stephen Fry: What about you?
JK Rowling: What music do I like? – lots of different things. The Beatles were my favourites. This is the nearest I’ll ever get to being a Beatle – hearing you all shouting. It was really very nice.
Stephen Fry: This lot makes more noise than a Beatles audience don’t you?
Audience YESSSSSS!
Question from a place you know very well indeed, Edinburgh from Janine Kerr
Video: “If you were a teacher at Hogwarts, what subject would you teach?â€
Stephen Fry: You’ve been a teacher of course.
JK Rowling: I’ve been a teacher. I would probably teach Charms. I see Charms as a slightly lighter subject than transfiguration which is very hard work. With Charms there would be a little more leeway for a little more personal creativity – transfiguration you have to get it exactly right, transfiguration is more scientific. My daughter would be much better at transfiguration, she’s very scientific.
Stephen Fry: What did you teach?
JK Rowling: French.
Stephen Fry: Do you still read and talk French?
JK Rowling: Very rarely. I don’t have a lot of time to read in French these days because I’m a mother! and free time is spent writing, and then reading a bit in English.
Stephen Fry: Where were you at school?
JK Rowling: In the Forest of Dean – that’s why Hagrid has that accent; He comes from The Forest of Dean.
Audience: Question from Natasha Morrison – competition winner in audience
JK Rowling: Hello Natasha!
Natasha: “How did you think of Quidditch because it’s so unlike any other sport I’ve heard of?â€
JK Rowling: Right well, if you want to create a game like Quidditch – what you have to do is have an enormous argument with your then boyfriend, you walk out of house, you sit down in pub and you invent Quidditch. I don’t really know what the connection is between the row and Quidditch except that Quidditch is quite a violent game and maybe in my deepest, darkest soul I’d like to have seen him hit by a ‘bludger’.
Stephen Fry: Do you ever play the computer games?
JK Rowling: I don’t but my daughter plays it – she’s very good. I can’t work Playstations. I’m no good at these things.
Stephen Fry: I never got past throwing the gnomes over the hedges which is level a half never mind level one…so…hello?
Caretaker: Hello Master Muggle. Question from the Muggle machine
Stephen Fry: Of course with everybody watching we’re getting a lot of questions emailed in. Matt is not from a real boy or girl this is from you isn’t it?
Caretaker: No… No ! ..How can you tell?
Stephen Fry: None of the nice boys and girls would want to know if wizards could make farts smell really bad, nor do they want to know what type of underpants Harry Potter wears, or which smells worse Unicorn poo or Dragon pee? You’re a disgrace! Don’t come back until you have a real question…Ridiculous!
JK Rowling: Dragon Pee (smells worse) (laughter)
We still have time to take questions from around the world so keep emailing and Mr Emulsion will bring them in…
Question from Jackson Long in audience competition winner
Jackson: “Professor Snape has always wanted to be Defence Against Dark Arts teacher. In book 5 he still hasn’t got the job. Why does Prof Dumbedore not allow him to be Defence Against The Dark Arts teacher?â€
JK Rowling: That is an excellent question and the reason is that I have to be careful what I say here. To answer it fully would give a lot away about the remaining two books.
When Prof Dumbledore took Prof Snape onto the staff and Prof Snape said “I’d like to be Prof of Defence Against the Dark Arts please†and Prof Dumbledore felt it might bring out the worst in Snape so said “I think we’ll get you to teach Potions and see how you get along thereâ€.
Stephen Fry: Now, Snape, we talked about him a little before, there’s something about letter “sâ€, isn’t there especially with that â€n†with it, you can’t help saying it without sneering or snarling… Snarl, sneer…
JK Rowling: Snake! I could have very easily called him, Snicket instead but it’s a funnier, kinder word so I didn’t.
Stephen Fry: Or sneeze is pleasant and of course and the Founder of the House (at Hogwarts) was Salazar Slytherin – another snaky thing. Snakes feature a lot – is a Parselmouth a real thing or did you make that up?
JK Rowling: Parselmouth is an old word for someone who has a problem with the mouth, like a hare lip.
Stephen Fry: So it is a real word again – very clever. Order of the Phoenix is 766 pages long – that’s a big book by any standards and as I’ve got to sit in front of a microphone and read it all out every word, I’m a bit cross with you. On the other hand it’s extraordinarily good value. You could have written eight books with the words you’ve done in these first five. Did you know it was going to be this long?
JK Rowling: No… I didn’t, I will say this. I had to put in some things because of what’s coming in books 6 and 7 and I didn’t want anyone to say to me “what a cheat you never gave us cluesâ€. If I didn’t mention things in Order of the Phoenix I think you’ve said “well, you sprang that on usâ€! Whereas I want you to be able to guess if you’ve got your wits about you.
Stephen Fry: To set up surprises..
Stephen Fry: Yes, there are few surprises coming.
Stephen Fry: You are pretty cruel to Harry – he gets such misery heaped on him, you pile on all the injustices, betrayals…against him.
JK Rowling: I do – I think he has the hardest time in this book although there are some scary things coming for Harry. In this book no-one believes him and also he’s a teenager. To have these two burdens in life at once is quite horrible. But from now on at least everyone knows he’s telling the truth. Whatever he has to face in the coming books he doesn’t have to deal with people being so distrustful of him.
Stephen Fry: Are we going to meet Hermione’s parents?
JK Rowling: We’ve seen them briefly but they’re dentists so they’re not that interesting.
Stephen Fry: (Laughter) You’ll be getting so many letters of complaints from dentists
JK Rowling: I love dentists really – I should never have been rude! I take that back– imagine next time I’m having my fillings done. )
Stephen Fry: It is another one of the most horrible and brilliant inventions of the books is this snobbery this idea of purebloods and mudbloods and this idea of mingling, mixed breeding which is a reflection of some of the things like racism and intolerance that we have in our world. Is that deliberate or did it come to you in a flash again or did it just suddenly…
JK Rowling: That was deliberate it was always there from the beginning as you saw with Draco – even from first book with Draco Harry discovers him first being rude about Muggles. I was also playing with that when I created Professor Lupin having a contagious disease so people are frightened of him. I really liked him as a character but he also has his failing though he’s a nice man and a wonderful teacher – in fact he’s the one time I’ve written a teacher… the kind of teacher I’d have loved to have had. McGonagall is a good teacher but scary at times. Lupin’s failing is he likes to be liked. That’s where he slips up – he’s been disliked so often he’s always pleased to have friends so cuts them an awful lot of slack.
Stephen Fry: Very true…very true we’re not going to go into the business who dies because not everyone has read the book but did it did cause a stir when you admitted it caused you some distress Do you feel emotional about a lot of the characters you write?
JK Rowling: I do. What I was trying to do with the death in this book was that I wanted to show how very arbitrary and sudden death is. This is a death with no big deathbed scene – it happens almost accidentally. It’s one of the cruel things about death and we’re now in a war situation where that does happen. That’s how it happens – one minute you are talking to your friend and the next minute he is gone, so shocking and inexplicable – one minute they are there but now where did they go? I found it upsetting to write because I knew what it would mean to Harry. [Edited]
Stephen Fry. Luna Lovegood lets talk about Luna Lovegood ……….
JK Rowling: Yes! I don’t know where she came from but I really like Luna – really fun to write. She’s slightly out of step in many ways but she’s the anti-Hermione. Hermione’s so logical and inflexible in so many ways and Luna is likely to believe 10 impossible things before breakfast…
Stephen Fry: Now to go back to one of the most infuriating characters you’ve ever written, Umbridge.
JK Rowling: She’s horrible isn’t she? I’m glad you hate her because I really loathe Umbridge.
Stephen Fry: She is the worst. (To Caretaker) Have we got a real one from the Muggle world?
Internet question from Jessica Wells, originally from Australia now living in London.
Email: “Harry saw his parents die so why hasn’t he been able to see the Thestrals before?â€
JK Rowling: I knew I was going to get that one…that is an excellent question. And here is the truth. At the end of Goblet of Fire we sent Harry home more depressed than he had ever been leaving Howarts. I knew that Thestrals were coming, and I can prove that because they’re in the book I’d produced for Comic Relief (UK) “Fantastic Beasts and Where to Find Themâ€.
These are lucky Black Winged Horses. However, if Harry had seen them and it had not been explained then it would cheat the reader. So, to explain that to myself, I decided you had to have seen the death and allowed it to sink in a bit… slowly…these creatures became solid in front of you. So that’s how I’m going to sneak past that one.
Stephen Fry: Absolutely, I mean if you can’t write new characters in new books that would be a bit hard on you. Can you explain in words of not more that two syllables, What is Arithmancy?
JK Rowling: Well your guess is as good as mine Stephen. Arithmancy is predicting the future using numbers. I’ve decided there’s a bit of numerology in there as well but how you do it I really don’t know.
Stephen Fry: Well that’s very honest of you thank goodness for that. This seems to be all the time we have for questions but I’m pleased to say this is far from the end of the show because very shortly Jo’s going to be reading from her new book
But just before, if there’s anyone here in the RAH in London or around the big blue world who doesn’t know what happened in the first 4 books – I don’t think there can be anybody, but somebody might have had their memory modified by a peculiar charm for example, we’re going to steal offstage while some experts tell you the story so far – see you in a bit.
Children on video clips tell the story do far…
In the beginning: Lord Voldemort tried to kill Harry Potter when he was a young baby, he came around and he killed his parents…he tried to kill Harry, but he just escaped with a scar because his mum loved him a lot. Albus Dumbledore left Harry as a baby on the doorstep of The Dursleys who are Harry’s only living relatives. There’s aunt Petunia Uncle Vernon and their son Dudley.
And his mum was really rude and looked like a horse a bit, Harry was 11 when he just found out he was a wizard.
Hagrid took Harry to Diagon Alley to buy all his Wizard goods and that, like his wand. The wand chooses the owner like the owner can’t choose the wand. So, he was given a few wands to flick about. He got one with a Phoenix feather and it (The Phoenix) had only ever given one other feather to someone and that was to Lord Voldemort, on the train you can get all kinds of different and unusual flavoured sweets (they are magical and can taste like anything) e.g. like bogey flavour.
To get Hogarts you need to get the train at King’s Cross Station is platform 9 and ¾’s.
At Hogwarts they teach all kinds of Magic Like Charms, Defense Against The Dark Arts, Potions err…Spells. There is a “Sorting Hat†that puts them into Houses (These are like Domes or Fraternity/Sorority Houses). There is Gryffindor, Slytherin, Ravenclaw and Hufflepuff.
The school game is Quidditch – four balls released from the centre, 7 people on broomsticks – snitch caught – game over. Then suddenly Muggle born children (those born from a one non-magical parent) are getting petrified – frozen, all over Hogwarts, There are all sorts of rumours about the Chamber of Secrets. In the Chamber is a big snake called a Basilisk which roams the school and kills Mudbloods. A Mudblood is a really disgusting name for someone who is a Muggle born.
A Muggle is someone who can’t do magic, for instance, the Dursleys. Lord Voldemort, or as I call him Vorldy, he used to call himself Tom Marvolo the real given him by his dad but he just re-arranged the letters.
Sirius Black, a notorious wizard accused of killing 13 people with one single curse, escapes from Azkaban (Prison), but actually it had been another wizard, Pettigrew who had framed him. Pettigrew used his wand behind his back and blew up a street and cut of his finger and joined the sewer rats.
He had been hiding for 12 years as a rat with Ron (Harry’s best friend) to escape from Sirius Black. Pettigrew escapes back to Voldemort and Sirius escapes on a big black winged thing to live happily ever after.
This year at Hogwarts the Quidditch tournament isn’t taking place instead there is the Triwizard tournament. The three champions have already been picked but The Goblet sparks up again and Harry’s name comes out of it
They get to the trophy at the end of the maze, Cedric and Harry decide to take it at the same time and they get transported to the location where Lord Voldemort is. So at the end of the book we have Lord Voldemort where all his followers were back in action and ready to wreak havoc!
Harry Potter watch out Voldemort is after youâ€
The story continues….
JKR comes back onstage…
JK Rowling: You can imagine how scary it is to read in front of Stephen Fry and I did say – “wouldn’t it be better if he did itâ€, but they decided I should do it so – sorry about that.
I need to explain to you what I’m going to read. If you have got your book with you and you’d like to read along, as I know some people like to do, I’m reading from page 583 (of the Bloomsbury edition).
It was quite hard to find a bit that doesn’t give too much away if you haven’t finished the book. But this bit is where Harry has to talk about what he might do after Hogwarts, and he has a bit of career advice from Professor McGonagall. As you may remember from the 4th book, “Goblet of Fireâ€, Harry decided it would be quite interesting to be an Auror which means to work at The Ministry of Magic to catch Dark Wizards. So he’s come along thinking he might do that and this is what happens.
During this reading you might get a hint of what might stand in his way of becoming an Auror apart from The Ministry’s current attitude toward to him, he needs a qualification that can be quite difficult to get… so here we go….
To read this section in full get your copy of the latest adventure, “Harry Potter and the Order of The Phoenix”
Description: In the section read by JK Rowling, Harry says he would like to work as an Auror with the Ministry of Magic when he leaves Hogwarts.
Professor McGonagall points out that the Ministry of Magic only take on the very best and are so strict that they hadn’t even taken anyone in the “past 3 yearsâ€.
The Professor sets out the challenges sternly and identifies exactly what subjects Harry will need to study for this final two years. He’ll need “a minimum of 5 NEWTs,†and nothing under “exceeds expectation†grades in everything. After that it will all be about “character and aptitudeâ€.
However, it is clear Harry will have to study very hard just to be accepted into the classes even at Hogwarts itself! Defence Against The Dark Arts, Transfiguration, OWLs, Charms and Potions all set very high entry requirements.
During the meeting tension rises as Prof Umbridge interrupts Prof McGonagall again and again to undermine Harry’s confidence, pointing up how unlikely Harry will ever have good enough grades.
The Professors disagree and an argument breaks out over Dumbledore! It is clear Harry has many, many obstacles to overcome…
CHEERS
Boys and Girls, Ladies and Gentlemen, just one more time we should thank this remarkable woman who has given so many millions of people such deep, lasting and eternal pleasure… JK Rowling!
CHEERS and APPLAUSE!
Source: http://www.msn.co.uk/liveevents/harrypotter/transcript/Default.asp?Ath=f
consulte Mais informaçãoGibbs, Nancy [entre outros colaboradores]. “A verdadeira magia de Harry Potter”. Time, 23 de junho de 2003. No mesmo dia de verão em que Catie Hoch, de 6 anos, bateu seu recorde pessoal de pular corda – 100 pulos...
consulte Mais informaçãoTradução: Naty Granger
Revisão:
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Treneman, Ann. “I’m not writing for the money: It’s for me and out of loyalty to fans,” The Times (London), June 20, 2003
At one minute past midnight, the fifth Harry Potter book will hit the bookshops. In an exclusive interview, J. K. Rowling tells Ann Treneman how she has finally come to terms with celebrity, and how marriage and her children have made her happier than she has ever been.
JOANNE KATHLEEN ROWLING is a happy woman these days, and it shows. She greets me at the top of the staircase at her home, babe in arms. His name is David and he is round and soft and cooing. We all go into the front room and there, on the shelf, is the other baby in her life: a 1kg doorstop that is the fifth book in the Harry Potter series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
“It is big. Very big,†she says. “I didn’t dare do a word count.â€
So how big is big? After all, Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth book, was 636 pages.
Joanne peeks at the last page. “It is 766 pages. When I finished it, I thought, Oh my God it’s bigger than Goblet. I knew already it was but I thought, well maybe it’s slightly bigger and then I spoke to my editor at Bloomsbury and she said, ‘You know how long it is, obviously?’ And I said, no, I don’t actually. And it was a quarter of a million words.†Her voice goes almost to a whisper. “I nearly died.â€
Don’t you have an editor who cuts things, I ask rather abruptly.
She laughs and takes on an actor’s voice: “Don’t you have an editor? Does anyone ever try to stop you!†She reverts to her normal voice. “Yeah. Of course they do. But they truly felt that the information contained in the book was necessary.â€
This is the third time I have interviewed J.K. Rowling. The first was in 1997, after the publication of the first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone. She was a rising star with no idea of the galaxy into which she and Harry would soon soar. “I never dreamt this would happen,†she said then, when sales reached 30,000. “My realistic side had allowed myself to think that I might get one good review. That was my idea of a peak. So everything else really has been like stepping into Wonderland for me.â€
Wonderland indeed. Three years later, in May 2000, we met in an Edinburgh hotel room. She had just finished Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and was quick and funny and nervous, smoking five Marlboro Lights in two hours and talking like a machine-gun at full rattle. At that time she had sold 30 million copies, a film was coming out and merchandising deals were brewing. Her wealth was estimated at £15 million but her life, which revolved around her daughter and writing and friends, had none of the gloss that money can bring.
Fast forward three years. Rowling has now sold almost 200 million books and is worth an estimated £280 million. She is wealthier than the Queen and is listed as the 122nd richest person (and the ninth richest woman) in Britain. Some people would revel in these facts, flashing them about like a diamond in sunlight. I doubted Rowling would: the last time we met she .denied she was famous and said her only major purchase had been an aquamarine ring that she called her “No One Is Grinding Me Down†ring.
I was curious to meet her again and see how she had changed. It is true that I had not seen Joanne showing off her lovely dining table in the pages of Hello! magazine or anything like that, but you never know: money and fame can corrupt as much as power. Facts are few. She is 37 now and married Dr Neil Murray, an anaesthetist, 18 months ago. Jessica, her daughter from an earlier marriage, is almost 10, and David was born in March. The family has houses in Edinburgh, Perthshire and London.
Her main home is in Edinburgh and that is where we meet. For some reason I had decided that she might be a minimalist – a hangover, or so my logic went, from the days of poverty. Wrong. Her home is vibrant with colour and patterns, and the front room busy with books and photographs. It is not a showcase but a lived-in family home. Apparently there is a dog somewhere in the house. Certainly there is a baby in the room who provides a gurgling backing track for the interview.
J.K. Rowling looks terrific. She gave up smoking three years ago and, as she is breastfeeding, has even had to forego the Nicorette. She explains this as she reaches for a pack of Wrigley’s and advises me to buy shares in the company. The interview, as events tend to be when tiny babies are involved, is the result of meticulous planning. She spent all weekend wondering how she was going to get the baby fed and changed and herself presentable “with all my buttons done up properly†at the correct time.
It takes one minute to see that she has changed. Definitely. She is more relaxed, her edges rounded off. The machine gun has been replaced by a lower and softer voice, though her chuckle-laugh is the same. I say that she seems different, calmer.
“I’m loads calmer. Yes. Loads. I think I’m loads happier now, which would make me calmer.â€
Well, I say, you weren’t the last time we met.
“But you saw me probably during the worst time. The last time you interviewed me was not a happy time. Writing Book Four was an absolute nightmare. I literally lost the plot halfway through. My own deadline was totally unrealistic. That was my fault because I didn’t tell anyone. I just ploughed on, as I tend to do in life, and then I realised I had really got myself into hot water. I had to write like fury to make the deadline and it half killed me and I really was, oh, burnt out at the end of it. Really burnt out. And the idea of going straight into another Harry Potter book filled me with dread and horror. And that was the first time I had ever felt like that. I had been writing Harry for 10 years come 2000 and that was the first time I ever thought, Oh God, I don’t want to keep going.â€
Rowling, who had the idea for the seven-book Harry Potter series on a delayed train to Manchester in 1990, had not taken a break since she began writing in earnest as a broke single mum. She wrote mostly in cafés then. When she finished one book she began the next immediately, sometimes on the same day. And so, fresh from producing Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, the fourth book, she felt immense pressure to start the next.
It was not the first time she had felt the strain of the deadlines. “The first thing that I did when I finished Prisoner of Azkaban was to discuss repaying the advance for the next book.†I look shocked at this. “Yes, you can imagine. People were a little bit shaken, I think. I said: I want to give the money back and then I will be free to finish in my own time rather than have to produce it for next year.â€
And now, after Book Four, she again told her editor that she couldn’t make such a tight timescale for the next book. “Because I knew I couldn’t do it. Well, I probably could have done it. Because I do work hard. I COULD have done it, but the book would have been lousy and I would have then collapsed completely and said: That’s it, no more. I can’t do it any more. So, I said this to them.†Her publishers told her to produce the book at her own pace.
She had a break from Harry but kept on writing because, as she says, “I have to writeâ€. She wouldn’t say much about what she was writing, except that it was “totally for me†and a story. Like a novel? “Yes,†she says. It is unfinished.
The break lasted the best part of a year. “I was also really conscious – and I didn’t need anyone to tell me this – that I needed to stop and I needed to try to come to terms with what had happened to me. I had to really try to cope with what had happened because I wasn’t coping. I wasn’t coping at all. For a long time people would say to me, ‘What is it like to be famous?’ and I would say ‘I am not famous’. Now this was patently untrue. It was the only way that I could cope with it, by being in so much denial that I was virtually blind at times.
“I always felt like I was racing to catch up with the situation. So I could cope now with the fact that I was being doorstepped but I couldn’t cope with the fact that they were now going after my private life. I was always several steps behind. I couldn’t grasp what had happened. And I don’t think many people could have done. The thing got so huge.â€
She is always asked why Harry Potter has been so successful. “And I cannot answer that question. I can’t. It sounds coy. It sounds disingenuous. I never think of it like that. I think it would be dangerous for me to think about it like that, to sit down and analyse it, to decide why. It would be an exercise in navel gazing. It would also possibly lead me to deduce that I was doing certain things right and maybe certain things I should drop and if you start writing like that…â€
From your head and not your heart, I say.
“Exactly. Then I think you are lost. And I would certainly be lost if I stopped enjoying it. And ultimately I need to do this. I mean, what is the point? I could have stopped writing four years ago and we would have been fine financially. So I’m not writing for the money. I could really do without the fame. The only point is to satisfy myself now and out of loyalty to the fans.†And Harry too, I say.
“Absolutely. When I say for me, it is for Harry … being true to what I know will be his end.â€
How would you describe your feelings about fame?
“I never wanted it and I never expected it and certainly didn’t work for it and I see it as something that I have to get through, really. It does have nice aspects but for me, personally, probably the negative outweighs the positive. And we are talking here about being famous as opposed to having the money because the money has obviously relieved me of an enormous amount of worry and it has made my children secure in the sense that I do know they will have enough to eat and so on. And that is what the money means to me.â€
Yes, I say, but you are way beyond that.
“Absolutely. It went way beyond that.â€
Is it odd?
“Yes, it is very odd. And you feel guilty about it. A friend of mine said to me the other day, ‘But I would just go in a shop and I’d just say I will have one of those, one of those and one of those in every colour. Why don’t you do that?’ But the fact is that once you can do that, you don’t really want to do that. The amount of stuff you actually want to buy, when you can, shrinks a lot. Whereas when I was completely broke, I would have bought anything.â€
So you wanted to acquire things, then?
“Yes. Because I couldn’t. I just couldn’t. I mean, a new tea towel, I could get quite excited about. You think I’m joking!â€
What do you mean about feeling guilty?
“It just seems, well, this came to me through doing the thing that I love doing most. So I suppose I feel that I haven’t suffered enough pain for it.â€
I say that is not how it works.
“I know. I know. We all know it doesn’t work like that. The world is completely screwed up. When David was born I had a company sending me free Babygros. I found it quite upsetting and I actually got quite tearful at one point. I remember Jessica, if someone had given me free Babygros then, that would have been a very big deal. That would have made my whole week. It is just very unfair, isn’t it?â€
Rowling says she loves to write, has to write, happy or sad, but that it is far easier if she is happy. The new book has been written during the happiest period of her life. She had already started work on it before her marriage on Boxing Day, 2001. I say it must have been thrilling to meet someone new. “It was incredible. I always wanted to have more children and I had reached the point where I thought, OK, I’ve been so lucky. I’ve got the books. I’ve got Jessie. I cannot complain and then this has been just amazing.â€
Is it true, I ask, that you meet someone when you aren’t looking for them?
“Yes. Definitely. I did not expect to meet anyone, actually. I thought the baggage was too much and it is a truism that when you do get famous, it’s not that I didn’t meet anyone, it’s that I didn’t meet anyone I wanted to have a relationship with, much less marry. Of course, you do meet people but it tends to be those who are very keen to approach you and maybe not those you would really want to meet.â€
She says it is fortunate for both her and her husband that their careers are so divergent. “The night we met he told me he had read the first ten pages of Philosopher’s Stone on a late-night shift at the hospital and he thought it was quite good. And I thought that was fantastic. He hadn’t read the books. He didn’t really have a very clear idea of who I was. It meant that we could get to know each other in quite a normal way. I think he’s up to speed now, poor bloke. At the time he didn’t really have any idea about it all.â€
She wrote most of the new book in Edinburgh and some in Perthshire. She no longer writes in cafés because people watch her and it makes her self-conscious. At home she writes all morning in her office, which is the size of single bedroom and the smallest room in the house, until she gets hungry, about 12.30pm usually. She breaks for a sandwich, then goes back to the computer until Jessie comes home from school (she has not had a nanny since becoming a two-parent family). They walk the dog, a Jack Russell. She makes tea. Neil comes home. Depending on how tired she is, she may write more in the evening.
One day a week is spent doing “charity stuffâ€. She has a charitable trust and is the patron of several groups, including one for single parents and the Multiple Sclerosis Society Scotland (her mother died of the disease in 1990 at the age of 45). I say that I believe she gives quite a lot of money away anonymously and she stares at the carpet, lips pressed.
Rowling became pregnant mid-book and knew she wanted to finish before the baby came. “I was getting bigger and bigger and bigger and then, just before Christmas, I realised I had finished the book and it was the most amazing thing. An incredible thing. It actually really took me by surprise. I was writing the last chapter, rewriting bits of it as you do, and then I wrote myself to the end of a paragraph and thought: Oh my God, I’ve finished the book! I couldn’t believe I’d done it.â€
I make some comment about how long it is and she says: “It’s hysterical. They went in one day from saying, ‘She’s got writer’s block’ to saying, ‘She’s been self-indulgent’. And I thought, well, what a difference 24 hours makes.â€
The “they†in that sentence is the press. She resents the idea that it has been reported that she had writer’s block almost as much as she resents the pressure of a deadline. She admits to being “too thin-skinnedâ€. “But that is who I am and I couldn’t do the books if I weren’t who I am.†She was genuinely distressed by the accusations, levelled by the American writer Nancy Stouffer, that she was a plagiarist and she celebrated when a New York court ruled last year that she was innocent. She is fierce about protecting Jessica’s privacy, never using her in publicity or going with her to film premieres. She rarely talks about her, although, when I ask why she bought the London house, she laughs and says she had been staying at Claridge’s and “my daughter was getting a bit too used to room serviceâ€.
It is easy to forget, sitting in this warm and light-filled room, about the darker side of Potter mania. But it is out there. Some people are obsessed with the idea that her books are teaching children about evil and magic and believe Rowling is a witch of some kind. “I found death threats to myself on the net,†she says, describing how she was looking for something when she found herself on a Potter-hater site. “And then halfway through this message board I found, well, people being advised to shoot me, basically. Which was not a nice thing to find. It is bizarre.†She sighs. “But what can you do?â€
“Fame is a very odd and very isolating experience,†she says. “And I know some people crave it. A lot of people crave it. I find that very hard to understand. Really. It is incredibly isolating and it puts a great strain on your relationships.†Most of her friends have been doorstepped and offered money by newspapers for their story and that makes Rowling feel guilty.
Her views on some journalists are embodied in Rita Skeeter, a character who, when last seen, had become a beetle and was trapped in a jar. “I have a fascination for Rita and I have grudging respect,†says Rowling. “She has the rhino hide that I would quite like to have but haven’t. And you’ve got to admire her tenacity and ingenuity. But I wouldn’t like to meet her.â€
It is difficult to do an interview on a book that I have not been allowed to read. She sympathises, but neither does she give much away. “This book is a bit of a departure. Harry is very angry. Very angry. And he’s angry for most of the book. But I think that is fair enough given what has happened to him and that he hasn’t been given an awful lot of information. So it’s not a very gentle tale. And there is a nasty death in it as well. Nasty because it is someone I care about as a character.â€
She adds: “This time it is someone I consider to be a main character.†She cried when she wrote the death scene, as she did twice when writing Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire.
Harry now “is very much in puberty, having as easy a time of it as I did.†And that was? “What I was, I wasn’t sure and I don’t think anyone else was either! I just think it is a very confusing time. Yes, he’s very confused in a boy way. He doesn’t understand how girls’ minds work.†I say that, at age 15, boys don’t normally say anything at all. She laughs and says Hermione is more than happy to fill in all those silences with her advice.
“This time Harry really, for the first time, does have a relationship of sorts. The emphasis very much on the ‘of sorts’. That was really fun to write, actually. I think you will find it painful. You should find it painful, it is painful, but it was such fun to write. Poor Harry! What I put him through.â€
She has already started to write Book Six. “I started it when I was pregnant. That was a different situation because I knew I didn’t have to so that immediately meant that I wanted to! You know, the absolute reverse of Goblet of Fire. And I’m also in a very lovely position. Contractually, I don’t even have to write any more books at all. So no one can possibly write that I have missed a deadline because I actually don’t have a contractual deadline for Six and Seven.â€
So you have freedom, I say.
“I do have freedom. I want to spend some time with David because I didn’t have him to hand him over to a battalion of nannies. But I do really want to do Six and Seven.â€
Surely, I say, Six will be shorter. And she agrees. “Seven, on the other hand, will probably be massive …it has been such a massive part of my life now. I can see myself being really scared to let go of it. I will probably reach the end of Seven and think, I’ll just tweak it a bit more, I will just tweak it a bit more. The fact that I will have finished will be extraordinary.â€
But isn’t the last chapter of Seven already written? Yes, she says, it’s hidden away. In a secret place? “Guarded by trolls.â€
Doesn’t anyone know?
“I’ve told no one. Literally no one. If you ever hear anyone claim that they know what happens in the end, they are absolutely lying. I’ve never told anyone.â€
Maybe if you got drunk …
“I would never tell anyone. I just know I wouldn’t. You couldn’t get me drunk enough!â€
It is time to go. David has exhausted his mobiles and swings and we have talked for one and a half hours. This interview is very different from the previous one, and it seems to me that in the past three years Joanne Rowling has grown up. She has faced her personal demons about fame, money and insecurity. She has balance in her life and now, in addition to everything else, freedom. It is a heady mix, certainly a Wonderland, but she will tread softly there. “I am the kind of person who expects Mr Catastrophe to be lurking around the corner because he often has been. “I try to strike a balance between being very grateful for what has happened – because I am so hugely grateful for it – and I am terrified of hubris because I think it could all go wrong tomorrow.â€
consulte Mais informaçãoTradução: *Celeste Morrigan*
Revisão: {patylda}
*OK Categorias e Conteúdo
Couric, Katie. Interview with J.K. Rowling. Dateline NBC, 20 June 2003
The battlements may look like Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, but it’s really the ancient Edinburgh (Ediborough) Castle. We’re in Scotland, home of J.K. Rowling, author of the story that has won the world over: Harry Potter. Her books about the boy wizard have sold more than 200 million copies and made Rowling richer than the Queen of England. In just a few hours, “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix†goes on sale, many booksellers will open their doors at midnight, hoping the fifth tale in the series flies out faster than a Nimbus 2000. Fans have waited three long years since the last installment. So, what took so long? In an exclusive interview J.K. Rowling dispels some myths and spills some secrets about her magical, mysterious world.
Calling all muggles—that’s “Potter-speak†for the non- wizards among us. IT’S THE MOST eagerly anticipated children’s book of all time, and midnight tonight is the witching hour. “Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix†continues the saga of the boy wizard with the lightning bolt scar — and readers of all ages have been dying to know what happens next.
Boy Fan: “I think that Voldemort is gonna come back.â€
Man Fan: “There’s probably going to be some tragedy somewhere amongst it…â€
Woman Fan: “…and romance…â€
Man Fan: “…and romance, yea.â€
Girl Fan: “I think Voldemort might die, and Harry Potter might become the head of the school.â€
I wonder what Professor Dumbledore would say about that? Deeper secrets, darker powers, stronger magic.†So we decided to go straight to the source — the author who’s cast this spell over us mere muggles: J.K. aka Jo Rowling.
JKR reads passage from book:
Dumbledore lowered his hands and surveyed Harry through his half-moon glasses.
“It is time,†he said, “for me to tell you what I should have told you five years ago, Harry. Please sit down. I am going to tell you everything.
Katie Couric: “Dun, dun, dunnnn…â€
Rowling: “…Dun, dun, duuuuh… ha, haâ€
As titillating as that one line from the new book was, I was counting on a little more 411. Clearly, I felt it was my mission to get Rowling to start spilling her Bertie Botts Beans.
Katie Couric: “Can you tell me a little bit about this book, or will you have to kill me?â€
Rowling: â€[laughter] I will have to kill you. But, you know, if you’re prepared to take that risk.â€
Stay tuned, because she does give us some clues later on, but there’s good reason why Jo Rowling so closely guards her chamber of secrets. In the last few months, fake chapters have shown up on the Internet and a British printing company employee was caught trying to sell stolen book pages. Keeping the secrets is crucial to the multi-million dollar marketing campaign. So there was concern the cauldron could be leaky. But of course, being a skilled journalist, I was able to craft my questions so carefully, she had no choice but to blab.
Couric: “Can you just tell me basically what happens to Harry in this book? That’s a specific question.â€
Rowling: “Yeah, that was very scalpel-sharp. He has a really hard time in this book, I would say.â€
Couric: “Is he going through puberty?â€
Rowling: “Yes he is. He’s angrier.â€
Couric: “Zits, does he have zits?â€
Rowling: “No he doesn’t. I see Harry as someone who has great skin. That’s the one thing he’s got going for him, thank God. I mean, spots on top of everything else would be too horrible for him. And he, yes, he does have certain adolescent, um, rights of passage happen to him.â€
Couric: “Any snogging with Hermione?â€
Rowling: (slight frown) “Hermione and Harry! Do you think so?â€
Couric: “No I’m kidding.
Rowling: “Ron and Hermione, I would say, have more potential (or did she say “tensionâ€) there†(A/N: I know this is a crucial sentence, but I had some trouble understanding her here— she mumbles the sentence a little. This is my best interpretation! Either way, R/H shippers around the world are grinning!)
Couric: We should probably explain that snogging means kissing.â€
Rowling: “Yeah.â€
Couric: “Lest people think they were shagging!â€
Rowling: “Lest people think you’re talking about something completely inappropriate.â€
The story of how JK Rowling brought Harry Potter to life has become a legend itself. She used to walk her daughter Jessica down this street in her stroller until she fell asleep, then duck into Nicolson’s Cafe and write while the baby slept. Back then, she was a single mum living on welfare. But now, five years and five books later, she’s remarried, has a new baby boy, and her estimated fortune is worth $500 million. Oh, and by the way, Nicholson’s Café, well that’s now a Chinese Restaurant.
Rowling: “It is true. I really was that broke and I know what it feels like to be that broke and to live through it and not to know it’s about to change. That’s the crucial thing. I couldn’t see any light at the end of the tunnel, and every day I’m grateful that we’ve got food in the fridge now and that I don’t have to worry about the bills and that I know I can afford Jessie’s clothes and it’s… yes, I’m grateful for that every day.â€
Couric: “Is there anything you miss now that you are so well known Jo and so wealthy and such a celebrity?â€
Rowling: “Yeah I miss the anonymity. Completely miss it.â€
Here in Europe, she’s more recognizable than she is in the States, and there are times when Rowling wishes she could wrap herself up in one of those invisibility cloaks.
Couric: “What kinds of things do they say to you, like if you’re out at the market or taking a walk, or…â€
Rowling: “Normally, they start with, ‘It is you isn’t it?’ I think I don’t look that distinctive, so very often if you’re at the supermarket you’ll start off near the apples and then you see someone’s kind of thinking, ‘hmmm might be her’ and then you’re halfway along and you’re by the yogurts and they’re thinking, ‘Yeah it is her,’ and they’ve got a kid with her and the kids going, ‘It is mum, it is mum, it is her.’ And then you get to the toilet roll always and you’re just reaching out for your favorite brand and then they come up to you, always.â€
Couric: “When you’re getting Tampax have you had that?â€
Rowling: “Always. Yes that did happen the other day. I was standing there with this box in my hand — yes of course I’ll sign autographs. May I put this down first?â€
Couric: “Better than Kaopectate or something like that.â€
Rowling: “Slightly.â€
Still, the 37-year-old author says Scotland does afford her more anonymity than her native England. She moved here in 1994, after her first marriage to a Portuguese journalist fell apart.
Couric: “Do you ever hear from your first husband? I bet he’s going, (slaps forehead) ‘What was I thinking?’â€
Rowling: “Yeah, a really big no comment on that one.â€
Her second marriage in 2001 to a Scottish doctor named Neil Murray (who looks like a grown up you-know-who), was followed this past March by the birth of their first child, David.
Couric: “Does he have glasses and a little scar on his forehead?â€
Rowling: “Well you see that’s why we called him David, because we had to find a name that didn’t rhyme with Harry, I hadn’t used in the books, had absolutely no mythological or magical connection, didn’t mean ‘he who must not be named’ in Hebrew, you know.â€
Meanwhile, Rowling’s money keeps, well, rolling in. The first four Harry Potter novels continue to fly off the shelves in 200 countries, in 55 different languages. And the phenomenon’s leapt off the pages and onto the silver screen. The first two “Harry Potter†feature films have grossed a combined $1.8 billion worldwide. But after writing four mega-selling books in a lightning-fast five years, some wondered if the long wait for book number five meant Rowling was losing her magic touch.
Couric: “Endless rumors and speculation about this book.â€
Rowling: “About why?â€
Couric: “It took three years to write. (JKR: “hmm, hmmâ€) People said you had writer’s block, (JKR: “yeaâ€) that you weren’t interested in Harry anymore (JKR:â€yeaâ€), that you were distracted by your family (JKR:â€yeaâ€) and your wealth.â€
Rowling: “Yeah, yeah.â€(laughs)
Couric: “So settle it once and for all, what did take so long?â€
Rowling: “Ah, well just the writing of it, it’s a long book, and that’s just how long it took to write. And I said to my publishers, I didn’t want a deadline this time because I knew I just needed to take some time. So it’s not true that I had writer’s block and as far as, you know, being distracted by other stuff, I mean I think I really would have been distracted before now. You know, I’ve been writing Harry through something like three changes of country, a marriage, a divorce, you know, birth of a daughter, unemployment, employment. I mean, I don’t think getting some money is going to knock me off track now.â€
“Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix†rises from the ashes at a whopping 896 pages. But even before its release, book five’s been worth its weight in Gringotts’ gold, setting records for the largest pre-ordered book in history.
Rowling: “There is a lot in this book. If I can only say that I’ve had to lay certain clues in book five. Some clues are resolved, some things are resolved in book five and there’s information in there that you really do need to know otherwise people will feel cheated when certain outcomes happen.â€
Couric: “You said when the last book came out that the death of one character was quote, ‘the beginning of the deaths.’ Yikes!â€
Rowling: “Yeah, that’s nice, isn’t it. There’s going to be a blood bath [laughter].â€
Couric: “Warm and fuzzy.What does that mean?â€
Rowling: “It’s a war. Essentially a war has broken out again and when I say the beginning of the deaths, I mean the deaths that are meaningful, I suppose, to the reader. In this book, what I consider to be a major character dies. It was awful to write. It was absolutely awful. And literally, well I did, I cried after doing it, and then, er, walked into the kitchen afterwards in tears. And Neil said to me, ‘What’s the matter?’ And I said, ‘Well I’ve just killed the person that I’m going to kill.’ And he doesn’t know who it is. And Neil said, ‘Well, don’t do it then.’ Which showed he completely didn’t understand that you need to be very unpleasant and vicious to your characters to write heart-warming children’s books. (KC: laughs) He’s a doctor, he just doesn’t get it. He’s you know, more into saving people than killing them.â€
But Rowling’s ruthlessness has come under fire. Some parents have criticized her for over-emphasizing dark themes such as death. And some religious groups have gone as far as saying the novels are potentially harmful and promote occultism.
Rowling: “I think that’s utter garbage. I absolutely do not believe in the occult, practice the occult. I’ve never… I’ve met literally thousands of children now. Not one of them has said to me you’ve really turned me on to the occult, not one of them. Now I’m convinced that if that’s what my books were doing, I would by now have met one child who would have come up to me, covered in pentagrams and said, ‘Can we you know, go and sacrifice a goat later together, will you do that with me?’ It’s never happened, funnily enough.â€
Couric: “You find it very annoying, I can tell.â€
Rowling: “Well occasionally I do, just occasionally I do. Because I am being accused of something quite horrible. So of course I’ve got to defend myself.â€
Couric: “What do you believe in? I’m just curious about your belief system — God, heaven?â€
Rowling: “Well, I do believe in God.â€
Couric: “You do?â€
Rowling: “Yeah, which I’ve said before, but that just seems to annoy them even more For some reason. I don’t think they want me on their side at all.â€
Rowling also dispelled the rumor there would be more than the seven Harry Potter books she’s promised. (JKR: “I don’t know where that rumor came from.â€) And true to form, she says she won’t accept a deadline for writing the last two. But one thing is for sure — now that the word “muggle†has been added to the Oxford Dictionary, Jo Rowling’s assured of literary immortality.
Couric: “That gives you a feeling about a) what kind of impact you’ve had, and b) how enduring people think these books will be, because as far as I know, they don’t take a lot of words out of the dictionary.â€
Rowling: (laughing) “That would be so embarrassing, wouldn’t it? It’s like being melted down at Madam Tussauds. I always thing that’s the ultimate humiliation. That’s why I wouldn’t really want to be in Madame Tussaud’s, because the day comes when they melt you down to make you into someone else.â€
Couric: “It does? Oh no, I’m in there.â€
Rowling: (covers mouth with hand) “OH!â€
Couric: “That’s OK, that’s OK.â€
Rowling: “Well, some people they keep.â€
The third Harry Potter movie, “The Prisoner of Azkaban,†just finished filming in Scotland, for release in 2004.
Tradução: Rö. Granger
Revisão:Adriana Snape
*OK Categorias e Conteúdo
Paxman, Jeremy, interviewer. “JK’s OOTP interview,” BBC Newsnight, 19 June 2003.
There are books, and there is Harry Potter.
They’re the biggest phenomenon in the history of modern publishing. 200 million copies, about a boy who discovers he’s a world-famous wizard.
They’re sold in over 200 countries, and translated into over fifty languages. Beyond the books is an industry – films, dolls, games and merchandise making hundreds of millions pounds a year.
All this from an idea which wandered into the mind of the then pretty penniless JK Rowling as she sat on a train. She imagined his story as a series of seven books, each spanning a year at the Hogwarts School for Witches and Wizards.
The fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, goes on sale in 28 and a half hours. It is confidently expected to have the biggest print run in history.
The author of this phenomenon lives in Edinburgh.
(Jeremy and JK Rowling sitting at table, looking at a copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix – in the office of JK Rowling in Edinburgh)
JEREMY PAXMAN: So this is it?
JK ROWLING: This is it.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Are we allowed to look inside it?
JK ROWLING: Hmmmm. Yes a bit. You can have a look there….yes so, that’s it.
JEREMY PAXMAN: How many pages?
JK ROWLING: 766 …. All with writer’s block, which I think you’ll agree is a bit of an achievement.
JEREMY PAXMAN: But do you find the whole secrecy issue, the need for secrecy, a bit ridiculous?
JK ROWLING: No.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Why not?
JK ROWLING: No not at all. Well, a lot of it comes from me.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Really?
JK ROWLING: Yeah definitely. I mean, of course one could be cynical, and I’m sure you would be disposed to be so and say it was a marketing ploy, but I don’t want the kids to know what’s coming. Because that’s part of the excitement of the story, and having – you know – sweated blood to create all my red herrings and lay all my clues…. to me it’s not a …this is my ….this is my….I was going to say this is my life, it’s not my life, but it is a very important part of my life.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Has it come at a price this success and fame?
JK ROWLING: The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous, and I never dreamt I would be famous. You know, my fantasy of being a famous writer, and again there’s a slight disconnect with reality which happens a lot with me. I imagined being a famous writer would be like being like Jane Austen. Being able to sit at home in the parsonage and your books would be very famous and occasionally you would correspond with the Prince of Wales’s secretary. You know I didn’t think they’d rake through my bins, I didn’t expect to be photographed on the beach through long lenses. I never dreamt it would impact my daughter’s life negatively, which at times it has. It would be churlish to say there’s nothing good about being famous; to have a total stranger walk up to you as you’re walking around Safeways, and say a number of nice things that they might say about your work … I mean of course you walk on with a bit more spring in your step. That’s a very, very nice thing to happen. I just wish they wouldn’t approach me when I’m buying you know…
JEREMY PAXMAN: Loo roll?
JK ROWLING: Items of a questionable nature, exactly. Always, always. Never when you’re in the fresh fruit and veg section. Never.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Do you think success has changed you?
JK ROWLING: Yes.
JEREMY PAXMAN: In what way?
JK ROWLING: I don’t feel like quite such a waste of space anymore.
JEREMY PAXMAN: You didn’t really feel a waste of space?
JK ROWLING: I totally felt a waste of space. I was lousy. Yeah I did, yeah . And now I feel that, it turns out there was one thing I was good at, and I’d always expected I could tell a story, and I suppose it’s rather sad that I needed confirmation by being published.
JEREMY PAXMAN: And what about the money? A lot of people when they suddenly make a lot of money, feel guilty about it. Do you feel guilt?
JK ROWLING: Yes I do feel guilty about it. Definitely I feel guilty.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Why?
JK ROWLING: When it first happened I didn’t immediately become very rich. The biggest jump for me was the American advance which was enough for me to buy a house, not outright, but you know we’d been renting until then. And I didn’t feel guilty, I felt scared at that point. Because I thought I mustn’t blow this: I’ve got some money, I mustn’t do anything stupid with it. And then yeah, yeah, I felt guilty. Yeah I did. I mean at least I could see cause and effect. I knew I had worked quite hard for quite a long time. Of course the rewards were completely disproportionate but I could see how I got there so that made it easier to rationalise.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Let’s talk a little bit about the next book. Harry and Ron and Hermione are all going to be older. How are they going to change?
JK ROWLING: Quite a lot because I find it quite sinister, the way that, looking back at the Famous Five books for example, I think 21 adventures or 20 or something, they never had a hormonal impulse – except that Anne was sometimes told that she would make someone a good little wife whenever she unlaid the picnic things.
JEREMY PAXMAN: But that’s the usual pattern of children’s books isn’t it? Swallows and Amazons is the same isn’t it? The children never age. But your….
JK ROWLING: And it reaches its apotheosis in Peter Pan obviously, where it is quite explicit, and I find that very sinister. I had a very forthright letter from a woman who had heard me say that Harry was going to have his first date or something and she said “Please don’t do that, that’s awful. I want these books to be a world where my children can escape to.” She literally said “free from hurt and fear” and I’m thinking “Have you read the books? What are you talking about free from hurt and fear? Harry goes through absolute hell every time he returns to school.” So I think that a bit of snogging would alleviate matters.
JEREMY PAXMAN: So there will be some pairing up will there in this book?
JK ROWLING: Well in the fullness of time.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Unlikely pairings? Not Hermione and Draco Malfoy or anything like that?
JK ROWLING: I don’t really want to say as it will ruin all the fan sites. They have such fun with their theories … and it is fun, it is fun. And some of them even get quite close. No-one has ever – I have gone and looked at some of it and no-one’s ever … There is one thing that if anyone guessed I would be really annoyed as it is kind of the heart of it all. And it kind of explains everything and no-one’s quite got there but a couple of people have skirted it. So you know, I would be pretty miffed after thirteen or fourteen years of writing the books if someone just came along and said I think this will happen in book seven. Because it is too late, I couldn’t divert now, everything has been building up to it, and I’ve laid all my clues.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Is Harry going to become a bolshy teenager?
JK ROWLING: He’s a lot, lot, lot angrier in this book. He really is quite angry a lot of the time and I think justifiably so, look at what he has gone through. It is about time he started feeling a little bit miffed at the hand life has dealt him.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Well when you look at a lot of that marketing stuff, that merchandise, when you look at things like the Harry Potter Ice Pumpkin Slushie maker and all that junk.
JK ROWLING: Is that a real thing or have you made it up?
JEREMY PAXMAN: I’m serious. There’s a list of about 50 of these things. Harry Potter Embroidered Polo Shirts, the Late Night Ride Towel, Harry Potter and Ron Weasley alarm clock. I mean it goes on and on.
JK ROWLING: I knew about the alarm clock. How do I feel about it? Honestly, I think it’s pretty well known, if I could have stopped all merchandising I would have done. And twice a year I sit down with Warner Brothers and we have conversations about merchandising and I can only say you should have seen some of the stuff that was stopped: Moaning Myrtle lavatory seat alarms and worse.
JEREMY PAXMAN: I thought that sounded rather fun.
JK ROWLING: I knew you were gonna say that. It’s not fun. It was horrible, it was a horrible thing.
JEREMY PAXMAN: But you could have said “No, I’m not gonna have any merchandising”.
JK ROWLING: I don’t think I could at the time. Not at the time. I’m so bad with dates. It must have been about 1998-99, I started talking to Warner Brothers, and at that point I just didn’t have the power to stop them. That is the nature of the film world. Because they are very expensive films to make, and if they keep making them which is obviously not guaranteed, but if they do keep making them, they are going to get really even more expensive, and I mean I shudder to see what they say when they see Book Five. Because I think they are starting to feel I am writing stuff just to see if they can do it. Which of course I’m not. But I know there are headaches about the scale of the world that I’m writing.
JEREMY PAXMAN: But do you never worry that perhaps your legacy will be not this entire world that you created but lots of bits of plastic?
JK ROWLING: Do I worry honestly? Completely honestly. No. I don’t worry about it. I think the books will always be more important than the bits of plastic. And that’s…I really, really believe that, and maybe that sounds arrogant but that’s how I feel.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Do you even know, when it gets to the level you’re at. Do you even know what you are earning?
JK ROWLING: No…
JEREMY PAXMAN: Do you know what you earned last year?
JK ROWLING: No.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Well it’s tens of millions, I guess…
JK ROWLING: I met my accountant recently and I said “They say in the rich list that I am richer than the Queen, so that means you’ve embezzled quite a lot of money.” I mean I do know what ball park I’ve got. I mean I’m not that clueless. And I certainly have not got £280 million.
JEREMY PAXMAN: What is it roughly?
JK ROWLING: Would I tell you?
JEREMY PAXMAN: I don’t know. You can’t blame me for asking.
JK ROWLING: No I don’t blame you for asking
JEREMY PAXMAN: You mentioned in the previous books you finished one and immediately started the next. Have you started the sixth one?
JK ROWLING: Yeah.
JEREMY PAXMAN: How far are you into it?
JK ROWLING: Not that far because I had a baby. But yeah, I started it when I was still pregnant with David. And I actually did get some writing done the other day, and that’s not bad going considering he’s only ten weeks. So he’s pretty full time at the moment. But yeah I did a bit more the other day.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Are we going to discover in book 5, why Voldemort has such an animus against Harry’s parents?
JK ROWLING: Yes.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Can you give us a clue as to…
JK ROWLING: No. It’s not long now. Come on. Yes you do find that out in book 5.
JEREMY PAXMAN: What else are you willing to tell us about what’s in book 5?
JK ROWLING: Obviously a new Defence against the Dark Arts teacher.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Is that going to be a woman?
JK ROWLING: Yes. And it’s not Fleur which everyone on the internet speculates about. And it’s not …Who’s the other one they keep asking about? Mrs Figg. It’s not Mrs. Figg. I’ve read both of those.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Are we going to discover anything more about Snape ?
JK ROWLING: Yes.
JEREMY PAXMAN: And Harry’s mother? Did he have a crush on Harry’s mother or unrequited love or anything like that?
JK ROWLING: Hence his animosity to Harry?
JEREMY PAXMAN: Yes.
JK ROWLING: You speculate?
JEREMY PAXMAN: I speculate, yes, I’m just asking whether you can tell us.
JK ROWLING: No I can’t tell you. But you do find out a lot more about Snape and quite a lot more about him actually.
JEREMY PAXMAN: And is there going to be a death in this book?
JK ROWLING: Yes. A horrible, horrible
JEREMY PAXMAN: A horrible death of a significant figure.
JK ROWLING: Yeah. I went into the kitchen having done it….
JEREMY PAXMAN: What, killed this person?
JK ROWLING: Yeah. Well I had re-written the death, re-written it and that was it. It was definitive. And the person was definitely dead. And I walked into the kitchen crying and Neil said to me, “What on earth is wrong?” and I said, “Well, I’ve just killed the person”. Neil doesn’t know who the person is. But I said, “I’ve just killed the person. And he said, “Well, don’t do it then.” I thought, a doctor you know….and I said “Well it just doesn’t work like that. You are writing children’s books, you need to be a ruthless killer.”
JEREMY PAXMAN: Is it going to upset people?
JK ROWLING: Yes. It upset me. I always knew it was coming, but I managed to live in denial, and carry on with the character and not think about it.
JEREMY PAXMAN: So you know what is going to become of all the major characters over the span of the series?
JK ROWLING: Yeah..yeah.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Why stop when they grow up? Might be interesting to know what becomes of Harry as an adult.
JK ROWLING: How do you know he’ll still be alive?
JEREMY PAXMAN: Oh. At the end of book 7?
JK ROWLING: It would be one way to kill of the merchandising.
JEREMY PAXMAN: That really would be killing the Golden Goose wouldn’t it?
JK ROWLING: Yeah well. I’m supposed to be richer than the Queen what do I care?
(JK Rowling and Jeremy Paxman in the kitchen)
JK ROWLING: I’m happier now I would say than I’ve ever been in my life, yeah definitely…..
JEREMY PAXMAN: But that’s not just to do with writing of course….
JK ROWLING: No … but it does have a lot to do with that. I needed to take off the time between books four and five, and I really feel like I got to grips with a lot of things. I sort of put my head up and got a big lungful of air, and I looked around, and I saw what had happened, and I allowed myself time to deal with it a bit better. I think if you’d interviewed me four years ago, I don’t think I would have been nearly as relaxed.
JEREMY PAXMAN: There’s an element in which, a way in which you’ve become public property.
JK ROWLING: Yeah.
JEREMY PAXMAN: That you belong, because of what you’ve created, that people feel like you belong to them.
JK ROWLING: Yes that’s definitely true. I think we get a thousand letters a week to this office – come and open my fete, write a personal letter to my daughter, come to my son’s birthday party – you know what I mean. And in some ways that’s very touching , that they think, really that they think that I have the time.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Well if you don’t ask you don’t get.
JK ROWLING: I don’t blame them for trying, I absolutely don’t. Except for the woman who wrote to me and said would I please make her and her husband an annual payment because they hadn’t been to the theatre in 3 years – and as begging letters go that wasn’t a great angle.
JEREMY PAXMAN: As begging letters go…you must get loads…do you give a lot of money away?
JK ROWLING: Well …mmmmm. I give money away, that’s all I can say.
(JK Rowling and Jeremy Paxman at the table, looking at notes)
JK ROWLING: This must not be seen too closely. This is the plan for Order of the Phoenix. I have these grid things for every book – well I have about twelve grid things for every book. It’s just a way of reminding myself what has to happen in each chapter to advance us in the plot. And then you have all your sub-plots. It’s just a way of keeping track of what going on.
JEREMY PAXMAN: And these scraps of paper which you’ve filed elegantly in a carrier, they’re plot ideas or …
JK ROWLING: Well some of them are totally redundant now because its been written and I keep them out of sentimentality’s sake, I suppose. But some of it has backstory in it like this – in here is the history of the Death Eaters and I don’t know that I’ll ever actually need it – but at some point – which were once called something different – they were called the Knights of Walpurgis. I don’t know if I’ll need it. But I like knowing it. I like to keep that sort of stuff on hand.
JEREMY PAXMAN: What’s your preferred way of working? I mean lots of people sit down and say “I must churn out 600 words or a 1000 words a day”. Do you work like that ? How do you do it?
JK ROWLING: No, well it’s like painting a fence isn’t it?
JEREMY PAXMAN: No – well, some distinguished writers have written like that.
JK ROWLING: That’s how you do it …
JEREMY PAXMAN: No – “distinguished writers”, I said… Somerset Maugham used to write 600 words a day and he’d stop more or less whether he was mid-sentence.
JK ROWLING: No I couldn’t do that.
JEREMY PAXMAN: So what do you do? You sit down and keep going until you’re too exhausted to continue….
JK ROWLING: Yeah pretty much actually. It’s the flogged horse school of writing. The thing about the 600 words, I mean some day, you can do a very, very, very hard day’s work and not write a word, just revising, or you would scribble a few words.
JEREMY PAXMAN: We know that you’ve written the ending.
JK ROWLING: I’ve written the final chapter of book seven.
JEREMY PAXMAN: So you know where you are going to get to. Do you know how you are going to get there?
JK ROWLING: Yes. Yes. I mean I allow a margin. It would be so boring if I really knew. It would be joining the dots, wouldn’t it? It’s not that well worked out. But it’s fairly well plotted. I mean it would be worrying if it weren’t at this stage, wouldn’t it, if I slid off book five and wondered what shall I write out in book six?. You know, it’s a complicated story so I need to know what I’m doing.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Do you ever wish you hadn’t started on it?
JK ROWLING: Yes. But not for the reasons you might expect. Sometimes, yeah, I’ve had very low moments when I thought “What the hell do I do this for?” But very rare. Very rare.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Why do you think that occasionally?
JK ROWLING: I haven’t thought it for a long time now, but it was while I was writing book four. I went through a very bad patch. The funny thing is that the press were writing that I had writer’s block with Phoenix.
JEREMY PAXMAN: That’s the next one.
JK ROWLING: Yes, the one that’s about to come out. And there was speculation that I was finding the pressure …well, it was funny because literally on consecutive days, either you’d have, either I was feeling the pressure too much and I was cracking up – or I was too happy being married. And that was stopping me writing. And you kind of couldn’t have both. But in fact, the Order of the Phoenix never gave me any trouble. It was quite a docile book to write. And then a lot of fun to write. Chamber of Secrets, I really did have writer’s block. Briefly, I think. It wasn’t a very serious case, it was only about five weeks. And compared to some people, what’s five weeks? Goblet of Fire, I was very unhappy towards the end of writing Goblet, and at the point where I realised I was fantasising that I would break an arm and therefore not be able to… I really mean this. I mean I was just a little way away from actually thinking “How can I break my arm so I can tell my publishers that I can’t physically do it?” and then that would give me more time. Because I committed to a totally unrealistic deadline. And I made the deadline But I really did make it by working round the clock really. I was so unhappy.
JEREMY PAXMAN: So you didn’t have writer’s block. The reason this book has been – what three years…. Three years since the last one isn’t it? Why has it taken so long?
JK ROWLING: Well it hasn’t.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Huh?
JK ROWLING: Well it hasn’t. The book didn’t take that long. I decided… What happened was, so Goblet of Fire, I was really in quite a state by the time that book was finished, and I mean at that point I really did feel a lot of things came together with Goblet of Fire. I mean the press attention had reached an hitherto unknown level, and I couldn’t work outside the house anymore, and just a hell of a lot of stuff was going on, you know. It was the fame thing. Do I still feel like that? No. But that’s because I took the time off. And I was still writing during those three years because I never stop writing. But I didn’t want to be published again. That was the big difference. So when I finished Goblet of Fire, I said to – there were only two publishers who had bought the next book – and I said to both of them, I want to repay my advance. And both of them, you could almost hear them having cardiac arrest on the end of the phone. “Why do you want to repay your advance?” And I said, because I don’t want to publish next year. I want to write this book in a more leisurely way and I want to take some time off. Because I had had … I finished Philosopher’s Stone, I literally started Chamber of Secrets that afternoon. I finished Chamber of Secrets, I started Prisoner of Azkaban the next day. And I finished Azkaban and I’d already started Goblet of Fire because they overlapped – so there was absolutely no let-up. And I knew I couldn’t do it. I just knew I couldn’t do it; my brain was going to short circuit if I tried to do that again. So they said “Well, how about we do still get the book when you finish it, but we don’t have a deadline?” So I said okay. So that’s how we worked it. So there was no deadline. So, just once and for all, and for the record, I didn’t miss the deadline. Because there was no deadline.
JEREMY PAXMAN: And you didn’t have writers block on that book?
JK ROWLING: No! I just produced a quarter of a million words. It’s quite hard to do with writer’s block.
JEREMY PAXMAN: That’s longer than the New Testament you know.
JK ROWLING: Oh God, stop it. With all these new facts that I didn’t know. Is it?
JEREMY PAXMAN: Yeah. By about 70,000 words or something.
JK ROWLING: Do you know the Christian fundamentalists will find a way to turn that into a reason to hate me as well. She’s more verbose than God.
(JK Rowling and Jeremy at table, looking at notes and books)
JEREMY PAXMAN: Has Book Five – that thing that’s the size of a house brick – it was originally much longer than that, was it?
JK ROWLING: No, actually it wasn’t . It’s about the size – originally I thought it would be slightly shorter than Goblet of Fire – and what is the phrase? The tale grew in the telling. It did. The thing is, I’ve got so much now, so much backstory to tell, but I really mean it this time. Six will not need to be that long. I had to move them around a lot in there, there’s a lot of to-ing and fro-ing in there.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Are you going to have a lot of loose ends to tie up in 7?
JK ROWLING: Oh god, I hope not. I’m aiming to tie it all up neatly in a nice big knot… that’s it , good night.
JEREMY PAXMAN: So that may not be particularly long either….
JK ROWLING: No, I think that will be long because I won’t want to let go. I’ll just keep writing. I’ll probably just start a completely new plot in book seven. It’s going to be very difficult to leave it . I mean, I do look forward to a post-Harry era in my life, because some of the things that go along with this are not that much fun, but at the same time, I dread leaving Harry… because I’ve been working on it over what I sincerely hope will prove to have been the most turbulent part of my life and that was the constant, and I worked on it so hard for so long – then it will be over and I think it’s going to leave a massive gap.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Do you know what you will go on to next after that?
JK ROWLING: Well, while I was in between, during the three years I’ve just had, I was writing something else for a while which was really great, it was good, and I might go back to that. I don’t know.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Is that an adult novel?
JK ROWLING: Mmmm. It’s just something completely different. It was very liberating to do it.
JEREMY PAXMAN: Be quite difficult for you though. You’d have to publish under a pseudonym wouldn’t you?
JK ROWLING: Exactly. But they’ll find out within seconds. I don’t underestimate the investigative powers of the press, but I don’t know what I’ll do. I mean, I know I will definitely still be writing. Will I publish? I don’t know. It’s what you said, of course you write to be published, because you write to share the story. But I do think back to what happened to AA Milne, and he of course tried to write adult novels, and was never reviewed without the mention of Tigger, Pooh and Piglet. And I would imagine that the same will happen with me. And that’s fine. God knows my shoulders are broad enough, I could cope with that. But I would like some time to have some normal life at the end of the series, and probably the best way to get that isn’t to publish immediately.
JEREMY PAXMAN: It’s not a bad thing to go to your grave with – having invented this entire world and made children want to read?
JK ROWLING: Oh God. No. Not at all. Of course I am immensely proud of Harry, and I’m never going to disown it, and I promise I am never, ever, ever going to apologise for it. Never. Because I am proud of it and I will defend Harry against all comers.
JEREMY PAXMAN: JK Rowling, thank you.
consulte Mais informaçãoTradução: Sarah Lee
Revisão: Adriana Snape
The Magic Behind Harry Potter
Interviewer: Lesley Stahl
Source: Sixty Minutes (CBSNews)
Date: October 3, 2002
Context: Publicity tour for Book 5
Quote: “No one knew a thing about me. And the only explanation for this was word of mouth with children.†— J.K. Rowling
Next week, children and adults around the world will finally be able to buy the book they’ve been waiting three years for: “Harry Potter And the Order Of The Phoenix”.
This fifth installment in the Harry Potter series will no doubt set all sorts of new publishing records. Right now, 8.5 million copies have been printed just for the U.S. market.
60 Minutes first introduced you to J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter’s creator, almost four years ago. And at the time, she was just beginning to understand the phenomenon she had produced.
Correspondent Lesley Stahl interviewed Rowling in a broadcast that first aired October 3, 2002.
When we first introduced you to Harry Potter a few years ago, more than a few people out there said, ‘Harry who?’
Today, there may be someone somewhere who doesn’t know him, but we can’t find him.
Harry Potter is the wizard hero of the world’s most popular novels – four so far, with three more to come. He’s also the star of two blockbuster movies.
Nothing has ever happened in the world of children’s books or any other kind of books, for that matter, to even approach the Harry Potter phenomenon.
But when we first introduced audiences to Joanne Rowling, Harry’s creator, the third book was just about to come out, and the scale of her success was just beginning to sink in.
Joanne Rowling, 36, currently the world’s most successful author, lives and writes in the shadow of Edinburgh Castle in Scotland.
“The basic plot is that Harry’s not only a wizard, he’s a famous wizard, which he doesn’t find out until he’s 11,†says Rowling.
“He finds out why he’s got this lightning-shaped scar on his forehead. He finds out that his parents were murdered and what he’s supposed to do about it, and also to confront the person who murdered them.â€
Harry Potter is an old-fashioned good-triumphs-over-evil story, full of quirks and surprises: boys on broomsticks, owls that deliver the mail. It’s set in a British boarding school just for young wizards called Hogwarts.
There are a million funny names like that: Headmaster Dumbledore, Evil Lord Voldemort and Harry’s know-it-all friend Hermione. It’s very apparent that Joanne Rowling was born to play with words.
“I used to collect names of plants that sounded witchy, and then I found this, ‘Culpeper’s Complete Herbal,’ and it was the answer to my
every prayer: flax weed, toadflax, fleawort, Gout-wort, grommel,
knotgrass, Mugwort.â€
Harry Potter was born in Rowling’s imagination nearly 10 years ago. She says she started by drawing pictures of the characters.
The drawings, which she once considered using in the books, are amazingly detailed: Harry, his awful cousin Dudley, Hogwart’s magical potions, Professor McGonagall.
Those images were turned into the vivid words that are now captivating so many kids: “Professor McGonagall watched them turn a mouse into a snuffbox. Points were given for how pretty the snuffbox was but taken away if it had whiskers.â€
“I met this mother in a signing queue not long ago who said to me, ‘Oh, and my son is here and he wants to meet you, but he was too ashamed of the state of the book to ask you to sign it,’†remembers Rowling.
“And it was all wrinkly and covered in rubbish and the cover was
falling off. And I made her go and get him because that is exactly the
state I want to see my books in. I have no track with these people, these very anally retentive people, who don’t crack the spine when they read a book. I say crack the spine and read it because that’s what it’s there for.â€
Harry Potter has now turned Rowling into a publishing figure of historic proportions.
“It’s unprecedented in American children’s books. It’s unprecedented in English children’s books,†says Eden Ross Lipson, children’s book editor of The New York Times. “There’s nothing that compares to the velocity of the success of Harry Potter.â€
What makes Rowling’s success all the more remarkable is what it
followed. In 1994, when her marriage to a Portuguese journalist collapsed, she moved to Edinburgh, Scotland. She had few friends and fewer prospects and ended up on welfare, actually skipping meals to make sure she had enough money for her four-month-old baby.
And while she thought of herself as a writer, she had never published anything.
“Someone, a journalist, actually said to me the other day, ‘So you
wrote your whole first novel on napkins, paper napkins,’†says Rowling. “No, I did not write on napkins. I could afford pens and paper, yeah.â€
But she was on welfare, and in bad straits. “I was in worst straits than I’ve ever been before,†she says.
By then, she had been playing with the idea of Harry Potter, and she says she’s always written, ever since she was a little girl growing up in southern England. Even when she worked as a teacher, she was just biding time.
She showed 60 Minutes a photocopy from a textbook when she was teaching in Portugal, scrawled with notes. “This was what I was supposed to be doing with the children, and on the back, you’ve got all the ghosts for Gryffindor.â€
Gryffindor is one of the dormitories at Hogwart’s. And her random scribblings were actually all part of a master plan. Long before she was published, Rowling already had seven Harry Potter books meticulously plotted out on grids, one for each year Harry spends at wizards school.
But before you assume she’s compulsively organized, you should know that her filing system consists of many, many boxes in her bedroom.
It’s one thing to have boxes full of notes, another thing entirely to turn them into a book. Back in 1994 with a baby daughter and no money, Rowling knew she had to write it quickly or forget it.
“I decided it was going to be my last-ditch attempt to get
this book published. And so I’d walk around Edinburgh pushing her in
the pushchair and wait till she fell asleep. And then I would literally run to the nearest cafe and write for as long as she stayed asleep.â€
Most often, she wrote in Nicholson’s Restaurant, where they
let her stay for hours, nursing just one cup of coffee. Finally, she
had a manuscript to send off – only to have it rejected.
“Four or five publishers turned it down, I think, and the consistent criticism was, ‘It’s far too long for children,’†says Rowling, who then began looking in a directory for a literary agent. She came across Christopher Little’s name.
“These things can sit in a pile for ages. They’re known as the slush pile. They’re the unsolicited and, you know, it’s the also-rans usually,†remembers Little. “And just by chance, two days afterwards, picked up this pile and went off to a lunch because somebody was turning up late. And inside, I started reading about Harry Potter and, you know, my toes curled.â€
He says he knew it would be a success. However, several more publishers turned Harry Potter down before the British company Bloomsbury finally bought it.
“That moment when he told me that Bloomsbury wanted to take the book, second only to the birth of my daughter, was the happiest moment of my life,†says Rowling, who realized that this was not the everyday children’s book once book sales were climbing steadily without any publicity.
“No one knew a thing about me. And the only explanation for this
was word of mouth with children,†says Rowling.
“The publishers printed, you know, very few books, as they often
do, and the demand came not from anywhere else but out of the playgrounds,†adds Little.
Kids in Stamford, Conn., are typical of the fans creating the Harry Potter avalanche.
“It’s very different. It’s not like a normal, average book,†says R.J. “It’s, like, so imaginative. It’s so detailed, you can, it’s almost like watching the book instead of reading it.â€
“She has a way of making things funny and still mysterious at the
same time,†says Lauren.
That’s what has kids turning off the TV and computer games. And it’s not just kids — adults are into Harry Potter, too. In Britain, there’s even a special grownup edition just for them. Everyone’s drawn in by the same thing: adventure and suspense set in a wizard world that’s magical and somehow still recognizable.
“She has this parallel universe, just a little off-center, that has a banking system, it has a newspaper, it has a ministry, a ministry of
magic,†says Lipson. “It is so complete. And because it’s complete, she can keep pulling rabbits out of this hat.â€
Just the fact that both girls and boys are excited about the same book sets Harry Potter apart. In fact, Rowling’s publisher originally tried to mask the fact that she’s a woman by using her initials, J.K. on the books.
“Traditionally, boys don’t like to read books written by girls,†says Little. “Girls read books written by anybody. But boys have this sort of peculiar sort of sexist thing.â€
Now, kids who don’t like to read or who have never read before are picking up Rowling’s books, reading them and wanting to read more.
“There’s nothing better than that,†says Rowling. “I’ve twice met mothers of dyslexic sons and one of them told me that their sons did read the entire books themselves … This absolutely supports my view that children are grossly underestimated.â€
Rowling would love to be left alone to spin out the rest of her series at a quiet corner table in an Edinburgh cafe. But she’s so famous now, that it’s getting harder to do. There’s also enormous pressure to turn Harry Potter into a marketing machine.
“We’re getting over 100 inquires a day, and whether it’s Sony Corporation or Microsoft or Boeing, to people that make, you know, cups and saucers,†says Little.
“If people could see the kinds of offers I’ve had to use Harry in advertising and publicity and all sorts of ridiculous, frankly, things,†says Rowling. “I’ve said no to absolutely all of them.â€
But Rowling is no longer the sole proprietor of Harry Potter. She’s sold Warner Bros. the rights to put him on the silver screen and everything that goes with that.
The movie “Harry Potter and the Sorceror’s Stone†was a huge, holiday hit and the most successful film of 2001.
As for Rowling, she’s still working on book number five, and she recently got married … no, not to a wizard, but to a Scottish doctor.
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consulte Mais informaçãoStahl, Lesley. “A Magia por trás de Harry Potter”. Sixty Minutes (CBSNews), 3 de outubro de 2002; re-editado em 2006. Contexto: Turnê publicitária para o Livro 5 Vídeo: 10 videoclipes com cerca de 2 minutos cada...
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Mzimba, Lizo. “Newsround talks exclusively to J.K. Rowling,” CBBC Newsround, 19 September 2002
Lizo spoke exclusively to JK Rowling about her reaction to her court case victory and how book five, the Order of the Phoenix is going. Here’s the full interview!
Lizo: How do you feel now that the court case is over?
JK: I’m so relieved. This court case has dragged on for a few years. I’m a really happy woman today!
Lizo: How do you feel about the fact that she made up so many things to try and win the case?
JK: You can imagine the relief that finally the truth is actually out there. While it was going on there’s nothing you can say, you feel powerless. The judge found for us very quickly – I’m really happy.
Lizo: There have been quite a few rumours about when book five will be out – when do you think it’ll be ready?
JK: There’s a lot of book done – that’s all I want to say because if I give a date and then I pass it everyone will be upset.
I will say that I have a beginning, a middle and an end – you could read it all the way through and I know a lot of Harry Potter fans will say just give it to us but I’m perfectionist and I want a bit more time to tweak.
I really am getting there and I have to laugh when I read the bits about writers block because I don’t think I’ve ever been blocked in my life!
I’m loving the writing and now the revising and I’m getting on really well.
Lizo: You can’t tell us whether that will be weeks or month?
JK: I’d rather not say just in case I have a bus accident and things get knocked off track! It won’t be too long – that’s all I’ll say!
Lizo: Is there anything that you can tell us about book five? Any new characters?
JK: Well, we’ve obviously got a new Defence Against The Dark Arts teacher because Professor Moody wouldn’t want the job again having been locked in a trunk for a year! It’s a woman this time.
You may see a little more of Mundungus and there’s a new sorting hat song.
Lizo: Is the book going to be as long as book four was?
JK: Yes, it is looking that way – it’s already passed Azkaban, so I think yes, we are looking at Goblet of Fire length.
Lizo: Do you keep an eye on the internet and all the rumours about when the new book will be out?
JK: For my own mental health it’s best not to go onto the internet and type in Harry Potter too often because it’s scary!
I will say that while the court case was going on someone told me to go and have a look at a couple of the fan sites and I did and they were very very supportive of me.
It meant a lot to me at a time when I was wondering whether anyone would ever believe that I hadn’t stolen from someone else -I’d like to say thank you to those people.
Lizo: Is this book is definitely called The Order Of The Phoenix?
JK: Yes
Lizo: We’ve had loads of kids e mailing in saying how glad they are the court case is over – they’ve followed it for two years – what is your message to them?
JK: Thank you. Thank you for believing that I was telling the truth. It did mean a lot to me.
People often think that when you’re successful things like this don’t hurt you and they couldn’t be more wrong.
It was really hard for a while and I couldn’t be more grateful to those people for saying that – it means a lot to me.
Lizo: The other thing is that we’ve had so many e mails from children saying ‘lets not hassle JK about the book, when it’s ready we’ll be really eager to read it’ what’s your message to them?
JK: I like them even more! They’re very unusual children because even my own daughter has no problem asking me about the book!
Lizo: Finally, what’s your message to children who’ve been waiting for the next book for a two and half years?
JK: It’s coming and it’s a lot nearer than you’d think if you read some newspapers – just trust me.
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Cramb, Auslan. “J.K. Rowling denies having writer’s block over next Harry Potter book,” Telegraph.co.uk, 8 October 2001
J K Rowling denies having writer’s block over next Harry Potter book
THE author J K Rowling yesterday denied reports that she had writer’s block and was struggling to complete the fifth book in her Harry Potter series.
She also dismissed speculation in tabloid newspapers that she had married her boyfriend during a beach holiday in Mauritius.
Miss Rowling said she was used to seeing the name Harry Potter “in articles containing little news and less truth”, but had decided to protest after reading “several columns of total fabrication” in the Scotsman newspaper.
In a letter to the paper she added that neither she, nor her publishers Bloomsbury, had ever stated that the fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, would appear in 2001. No deadline had ever been set for the delivery of the manuscript, and this fact had been “on record for over a year” and been grasped by children all over Britain.
She added: “I made it clear last summer that I wanted to take the time to make sure that book five was not dashed off to meet a deadline, but was completed to my full satisfaction as its predecessors have been, as I was committed to producing two additional books for Comic Relief this year.
“And while we are on the subject of non-news, some people seem to need reminding that wearing a swimsuit in the vicinity of a man in shorts does not constitute a marriage ceremony, even in Mauritius.”
Miss Rowling, 35, who lives in Edinburgh, was photographed last week on holiday in Mauritius with Dr Neil Murray, 30, an anaesthetist.
Copyright of Telegraph Group Limited 2001
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Rowling, J.K. “Press Release: JK Rowling says ‘No writer’s block,'” The Scotsman, October 2001
PRESS RELEASE: Resigned though I have become to seeing the name “Harry Potter” in articles containing little news and less truth, when The Scotsman decides to devote most of its front page (8 August) to several columns of total fabrication, the moment has come to protest. As I, my publishers and my agent have stated since the publication of Goblet of Fire, in July 2000, there was never any intention of publishing the fifth Harry Potter book in 2001, nor has any deadline ever been set for the delivery of the manuscript.
These facts have been on record for over a year and, as children all over Britain have grasped them with ease, I am mystified to know why “Scotland’s national newspaper” is so slow on the uptake.
I made it clear last summer that I wanted to take the time to make sure that book five was not dashed off to meet a deadline, but was completed to my full satisfaction as its predecessors have been, as I was committed to producing two additional books for Comic Relief this year.
There is no writer’s block; on the contrary, when your journalists take a break from leaning on my doorbell, I am writing away very happily.
And while we are on the subject of non-news, some people seem to need reminding that wearing a swimsuit in the vicinity of a man in shorts does not constitute a marriage ceremony, even on Mauritius.
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Kurtz, Frank. “Rowling Denies Writer’s Block Rumors,” Associated Press, 10 August 2001
J. K. Rowling is personally debunking rumors that a writer’s block is what is preventing the fifth [HARRY POTTER] novel from getting written and published for 2001. The rumor had been reported by the UK’s The Scotsman newspaper.
Rowling swiftly responded to the rumor in a letter to the paper, stating, “There is no writer’s block – on the contrary, I am writing away very happily.
“Regarding the as yet untitled fifth book’s release date, Rowling says, “As I, my publishers and my agent have stated since the publication of [GOBLET OF FIRE] in July 2000, there was never any intention of publishing the fifth [HARRY POTTER] in 2001, nor has any deadline ever been set for the delivery of the manuscript.”
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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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Author & title unknown. Interview of J.K. Rowling, Detroit News, March 19, 2001
We spoke via conference call to J.K. Rowling, the author of the Harry Potter book series. She does not believe in magic, but she sees it “as a beautiful metaphor for other things in life.” She told us that writing the book series did not come easy; she had to rewrite the first Harry Potter book 13 times. We asked her what we had to look forward to in the fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix. She wouldn’t be specific, but she said it would be the “end of an era.”
Q. What is the meaning behind Harry’s lightning bolt scar?
A. There are some things I can tell you about it, and some things I can’t. I wanted him to be physically marked by what he has been through. It was an outward expression of what he has been through inside. I gave him a scar in a prominent place so other people would recognize him. It is almost like being the chosen one or the cursed one, in a sense. Someone tried to kill him; that’s how he got it. I chose the lightning bolt because it was the most plausible shape for a distinctive scar. As you know, the scar has certain powers, and it gives Harry warnings. I can’t say more than that, but there is more to say.
Q. From what we’ve read in interviews, you thought of Harry Potter while riding on the train. Did something happen that made you think of the story?
A. It was the weirdest feeling. I was on the train, and it seemed liked the idea was just floating in my head. It was like the idea had been floating around waiting for someone to write it, and it chose me. It was like an explosion in my head. It was like magic. I know that sounds corny, but it was like pure inspiration. You can always tell when you have had a good idea when you are writing because you get this physical response to it, a surge of excitement. You can normally tell the good ideas from the bad because of that gut feeling and you get physically excited. I never felt such excitement. I’ve been writing for years, and I just felt that this one would be so much fun to write.
Q. Will the fifth book be based on a major event or will it get back to Quidditch games and magic lessons?
A. Normal life is kind of reviewed. Magic lessons will be back, but as usual, there is a lot more going on than that.
Author J. K. Rowling likes the mystery behind her Harry Potter books — so she won’t tell us much about the next one.
Source: The Leaky Cauldron archives: http://www.the-leaky-cauldron.org/MTarchives/000608.html
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Adler, Margot. “Harry Potter,” Morning Edition, NPR Radio, 27 October, 2000
Transcript courtesy of Sugarquill’s Transcription Project
Audio: Offsite NPR Radio
BOB EDWARDS, host: Harry Potter has cast a magic spell on the publishing industry. The latest book about the young wizard in training, “Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire,” still is a best-seller, even though it came out over the summer. “Goblet of Fire” and the first three books in the series have sold more than 40 million copies in the U.S. A Harry Potter movie is due out next year. Author J.K. Rowling already is working on the next installment of the seven-part series. She spoke with NPR’s Margot Adler.
MARGOT ADLER reporting:
I know that when I read books as a kid, the characters became part of my fantasy life. And you’ve lived with Harry Potter for more than 10 years.
Ms. J.K. ROWLING (Author): Yeah.
ADLER: And I’m wondering, is he less with you now, more with you now? Does he sit on your shoulder? You know what I’m talking about.
Ms. ROWLING: Still very with me, always. Of course. I mean, this is a very, very all-consuming project, a seven-novel series. I have 127 characters. That’s a lot of characters to keep in play. It’s an increasingly complex plot, as I always planned it. Obviously it’s the focus of an enormous amount of my time and energy and a huge part of my life.
ADLER: I keep on being at war with a desperate desire to see the movie…
Ms. ROWLING: I know. I think, you know…
ADLER: …and that feeling of, `Oh, will they destroy my own imagination, my own Harry Potter in my head?’ You know…
Ms. ROWLING: It’s my belief, you know, people who have stayed with Harry for four years now, I doubt that seeing the movie could harm their imagined Harry or Hogwarts. But I know what you mean. I mean, I think a lot of people are going to feel that. They really want to see it. I met a really clever reader the other day, and this is what’s wonderful about books; she said to me, `I really know what Neville looks like.’ And I said, `Describe Neville for me.’ And she said, `Well, he’s short and he’s black, and he’s got dreadlocks.’ Now, to me, Neville’s short and plump and blond, but that’s what’s great about books. You know, she’s just seeing something different. People bring their own imagination to it. They have to collaborate with the author on creating the world.
ADLER: Now you still have at least three years to go to write five, six and seven of the series.
Ms. ROWLING: Yeah.
ADLER: And given that Harry Potter was–What?–10 years in the making, are there other projects that are beginning to percolate? I’m not saying you have to tell us those, but that are beginning to sort of percolate in your head for sort of beyond Harry?
Ms. ROWLING: There are ideas, but as I say, it’s 127 characters in this very long–I’m not eager to finish Harry. I don’t want to lose the momentum, so I’m not about to take time off from writing it, in the sense that I don’t want to walk away from it and come back. It’s going to be like a bereavement to finish the books; they’ve been such a huge part of my life. And I neither want to hasten towards it, nor do I want to extend the series unnecessarily.
ADLER: And you said that with book five, you’re going to be a little more relaxed about it, right?
Ms. ROWLING: A little bit more, and I’m only saying that because book four–and this was no one’s fault. It wasn’t my publisher’s fault, and it wasn’t my fault. It was one of the–blame my muse. My muse went wrong. She led me up a blind alleyway, and I had to scrap out of the book, and I went back and I rewrote and I still loved the writing of it, but it was very pressured at one point. And that was really pressure I was putting on myself. Obviously I wanted to finish the book to my satisfaction, and I also didn’t want to disappoint people by missing the deadline. We made the deadline, but I did do that by putting in very, very long days and working in a far more pressured way than I normally work. You know, I’m writing book five now. It will be ready when it’s ready.
ADLER: Is there anything about book five, any little piece, that you can relate to our audience?
Ms. ROWLING: I could give you the title.
ADLER: Mm-hmm.
Ms. ROWLING: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.
ADLER: “The Order of the Phoenix.”
Ms. ROWLING: Uh-huh. But I’m not telling you anything else.
ADLER: That’s fine. How are you protecting yourself from all the celebrity in order to have time to write?
Ms. ROWLING: Mostly, it’s really not that difficult. You know, people ask me, “Can you still walk down the street without being recognized?” Very easily. The more difficult aspect is that you do find everyone wants something, and loads of the people who want something want it for very, very good causes, but there has to be a cut-off point because I will not produce any more work if I do everything that people are asking of me. So there are charities I do work for, but obviously I have to turn a lot of it down. Quite apart from wanting to continue to be a novelist, I want to see my daughter. I don’t want to–you know, she comes first, Harry comes second.
ADLER: You want to have a life.
Ms. ROWLING: Yeah, a life would be nice. I didn’t even think of that. I remember having a life. I was right…
ADLER: You remember having a life?
Ms. ROWLING: Yes. It was fun.
ADLER: But has there been an upside for all this renown?
Ms. ROWLING: Oh, huge upside. The huge upside is meeting kids and meeting readers. That’s hugely enjoyable. There’s absolutely no negative in meeting the readers, none. Really none. I mean, I’ve never met a child who was anything less than delightful, really. It’s wonderful. I love giving readings. I love answering kids’ questions. In fact, this is very difficult, but journalists have been asking me for the title of book five, and I finally–this morning, I cracked and told an eight-year-old boy because I just wanted to see the look on his face when I told him. But only occasionally do I think, “What have you done?” And normally that’s on a day when some journalist has come and banged on my front door, and I never expected that, and I can’t say I particularly enjoy that. But most of the time, it is really wonderful.
ADLER: Knowing what you know now about the last four years you’ve experienced, is there anything that you’d do differently?
Ms. ROWLING: In retrospect, only fairly trivial things. Overall, no, not really. In terms of the writing, you always look back at your work, your books, and think, “Why did I say it that way? Why did I do it that way?” I think the urge to tinker remains even after the books are in print. In other ways, in sort of handling everything that’s happened, I’m still learning on the job. But by and large, you know, I’m a happy person. I think I’d be enormously ungrateful if I said I wasn’t. This morning I met the winners of a competition Scholastic ran. They had set essays: “How Harry Potter changed my life.” They had 10,000 entries. Can you believe that?
ADLER: Ten thousand?
Ms. ROWLING: Mm-hmm. That was a humbling experience. You go through an experience like that, suddenly the journalist banging on your front door doesn’t seem that important anymore.
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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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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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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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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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