“I am an extraordinarily lucky person, doing what I love best in the world,” says Rowling. “I'm sure that I will always be a writer.”
Rowling is currently ranked as the 136th richest person in the world. In 2006, she was named the second richest female entertainer in the world by Forbes magazine, and in 2007, she was deemed 48th on the same magazine’s 100 most powerful celebrities list.
But that fame and success is never what Rowling was in search of. “I just wrote the sort of thing I liked reading when I was younger (and still enjoy now!),” she says. “I didn't expect lots of people to like them, in fact, I never really thought much past getting them published.”
Rowling wanted to make her contribution the world, to add her unique something that nobody else could bring to the table – and that unique something was her writing. She never went searching for the kind of success she has received today. She simply wanted to do best what she loved most, and that was writing.
She could have written about life as a single mother on welfare, but she knew it had been done to death before. She could have written about her work with Amnesty International, but she knew as a secretary, she was in no position to do so. Rowling wanted to write about something she knew, and something she loved. That, she decided, was children.
“I just write what I wanted to write,” she says. “I write what amuses me. It’s totally for myself.” Not only was Rowling a mother with her own infant children at the time of writing Harry Potter, but she had also been both an English teacher in Portugal and a French teacher in Edinburgh. These positions had put her in direct contact with youth. She learned to understand them, their likes and dislikes, their attitudes, their habits.
Using what she had witnessed firsthand as both a mother and teacher, Rowling could not only create better youth characters for her books, but she could also write stories she knew children would want to hear. She understood what types of characters they would be drawn to, what kinds of magic they would be spellbound by. And she knew she could write about it in a way that no one else could. With that, she knew she had found her genre.
Rowling took something she knew very well, added a little of her own magic and imagination to it, and had created something new and fantastical. Much like Harry Potter himself, Rowling took on the role of wizard herself, mixing parts of what she knew and what she loved to create a new recipe for success.
“The fame thing is interesting because I never wanted to be famous,” says Rowling, “and I never dreamt I would be famous.” Rowling just wanted to write and do the only thing she loved and knew how to do.
Lesson #4: Do What You Know and Love
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