J. K. Rowling
Rowling was born in Yate, Gloucestershile, England. When she was a child, she often wrote fantasy stories and would usually read them to her sister, Di. The first story she ever wrote down was about a rabbit called Rabbit. The story was a story about how she fell down a rabbit hole and was fed strawberries by the rabbit family inside it. She showed this story to her mother when she was six years old, in which her mother told her how great the story was. She thought to herself, “Are we going to get it published?” She knew from a very young age that she wanted to get a book published one day, but she would have to wait for some time.
Fast forward 19 years later, she was on a four-hour-delayed train from Manchester to London one day when suddenly, the idea for a story of a young boy attending a school of wizardry came to her. “I really don’t know where the idea came from. It started with Harry, then all these characters and situations came flooding into my head.”
When she got home, she began to write down everything immediately. Although this would mark the beginning of her success, during the December of that year, her mother died after battling multiple sclerosis for ten years.
Her mother’s death heavily affected her writing.
Especially the parts when Harry lost his parents because Rowling knew how it felt, but sadly her mother would never know about Harry Potter.
To get over these troubling times, Rowling moved to Porto, Portual to teach English as a foreign language. While over there, she fell in love with a Portuguese television journalist name Jorge Arantes and married him. One year later, they had a child, Jessica. During that same year however, her husband separated with her.
‘I had a short and really quite catastrophic marriage and I’m left with this baby, and I got to get this baby back to Britain and I got to rebuild us a life. And adrenaline kept me going through that and it was only when I came to rest that it hit me… what a complete mess I had made of my life.’
It was tough times for her. Rowling would raise her one year old daughter and together moved to be near her sister in Edinburgh, Scotland. They didn’t have much money and was living almost entirely off of benefits.
At this period in her life, she was clinically depressed and contemplated suicide.
For some reason however, she knew she had to keep going. She was at the lowest point of her life, but still had the bare essentials left with to finish what was meant to do.
I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything than what I was and began to direct all my energy to finish the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded in anything else, I might never have found the determination in the one arena where I believed I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter and a big idea. And so rock bottom became the solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life.
She began taking a year-long course in 1995 to study in order to earn a certificate of education so she could teach English in Scotland. During this entire time, she would complete her first novel while surviving on welfare. She wrote in many cafes whenever she could get her daughter to fall asleep.
During the year of 1995, she had finished her manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philospher’s Stone on an old manual typewriter. She sent her book out to find a publisher, but her book was constantly rejected. In total, it was rejected 12 times by different publishing houses, before it was finally accepted by a small British publishing house in London, England. They told Rowling to get a day job since there was little chance of making money in children’s books.
Good news finally came to her in 1998, when an auction was held in the US for the rights to publish her novel. It was won by Scholastic Inc. for $105,000. Rowling said she “nearly died” when she heard the news.
Harry Potter and the Philospher’s Stone was then later changed to Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. Once this book was published in the United States, it went on to become a global phenomenon with thousands upon thousands of copies sold as well as an entire movie series devoted to her books. Her final book, The Deathly Hollows, sold over 7000 copies a minute during the first 24 hours of its release, making it the fastest selling book in all-time history.
From 17 years of writing Harry Potter, from being a single mother supporting a child, and from living in as poor as it could possibly be in Britain without being homeless, Joanne Kathleen Rowling eventually went on to become a billionaire and also one of the most popular, likable authors for children and adults around the world.
‘You might never fail on the scale I did, but some failure in life is inevitable. It is impossible to live without failing at something unless you live so cautiously you might have well not as lived at all, in which case you fail by default.’
-J. K. Rowling
Source: Hulbert Lee
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