Q. Do you have tips for others trying to write?

A: I have to say that I can’t stand lists of ‘must do’s’, whether in life or in writing. Something rebels in me when I’m told what I have to do before I’m fifty, or have to buy this season, or have to write if I want to be a success.

Ten Habits All Best-Selling Writers Have In Common. These Five Tips Will Transform Your Writing! Follow J.K. Rowling’s Golden Rules For Success!

I haven’t got ten rules that guarantee success, although I promise I’d share them if I did. The truth is that I found success by stumbling off alone in a direction most people thought was a dead end, breaking all the 1990s shibboleths about children’s books in the process. Male protagonists are unfashionable. Boarding schools are anathema. No kids book should be longer than 45,000 words.

So forget the ‘must do’s’ and concentrate on the ‘you probably won’t get far withouts’, which are:

Reading

This is especially for younger writers. You can’t be a good writer without being a devoted reader. Reading is the best way of analysing what makes a good book. Notice what works and what doesn’t, what you enjoyed and why. At first you’ll probably imitate your favourite writers, but that’s a good way to learn. After a while, you’ll find your own distinctive voice.

Discipline

Moments of pure inspiration are glorious, but most of a writer’s life is, to adapt the old cliché, about perspiration rather than inspiration. Sometimes you have to write even when the muse isn’t cooperating.

Resilience and humility

These go hand-in-hand, because rejection and criticism are part of a writer’s life. Informed feedback is useful and necessary, but some of the greatest writers were rejected multiple times. Being able to pick yourself up and keep going is invaluable if you’re to survive your work being publicly assessed. The harshest critic is often inside your own head. These days I can usually calm that particular critic down by feeding her a biscuit and giving her a break, although in the early days I sometimes had to take a week off before she’d take a more kindly view of the work in progress. Part of the reason there were seven years between having the idea for Philosopher’s Stone and getting it published, was that I kept putting the manuscript away for months at a time, convinced it was rubbish.

Courage

Fear of failure is the saddest reason on earth not to do what you were meant to do. I finally found the courage to start submitting my first book to agents and publishers at a time when I felt a conspicuous failure. Only then did I decide that I was going to try this one thing that I always suspected I could do, and, if it didn’t work out, well, I’d faced worse and survived.

Ultimately, wouldn’t you rather be the person who actually finished the project you’re dreaming about, rather than the one who talks about ‘always having wanted to’?

Independence

By this, I mean resisting the pressure to think you have to follow all the Top Ten Tips religiously, which these days take the form not just of online lists, but of entire books promising to tell you how to write a bestseller/what you MUST do to be published/how to make a million dollars from writing.

I often recommend a website called Writer Beware (https://accrispin.blogspot.com) to new and aspiring writers. It’s a fantastic resource for anyone who’s trying to decide what might be useful, what’s worth paying for and what should be avoided at all costs. Unfortunately, there are all kinds of scams out there that didn’t exist when I started out, especially online.

Ultimately, in writing as in life, your job is to do the best you can, improving your own inherent limitations where possible, learning as much as you can and accepting that perfect works of art are only slightly less rare than perfect human beings. I’ve often taken comfort from Robert Benchley’s words: ‘It took me fifteen years to discover I had no talent for writing, but I couldn’t give it up, because by that time I was too famous.’

Q. What do you love most about the writing life?

A: I can’t answer this without sounding melodramatic. The truth is that I can’t really separate a ‘writing life’ from ‘life.’ It’s more of a need than a love. I suppose I must spend most of my conscious life in fictional worlds, which some people may find sad, as though there must be something lacking in my external life. There really isn’t! I’m a happy person, by and large, with a family I adore and quite a few activities I enjoy. It’s just that I have other worlds in my head that I often slip in and out of and I don’t really know how it would feel to live any other way.

Q. What does it feel like having your work scrutinised? 

A: Having your work scrutinised is an inevitable concomitant of being a professional writer. I never dreamed that there would be a fandom the size of Harry Potter’s picking over the books. It’s staggering and wonderful. Given that I’m fairly obsessive myself, these are kindred spirits.

I could have spent literally every hour of every day discussing Potter characters, plot twists and theories with fans over the last ten years, but as I want to work on new things, I don’t give in to this temptation that frequently.

I miss the days when readings and events were slightly more low key.  I’m not complaining, but when audiences grow big you obviously can’t reach everyone who wants to ask you a question. Being able to engage with people on Twitter goes some way to solving this for me.  It’s astounding that people are still so interested in those books, and I doubt I’ll ever stop interacting as long as there are readers who know the world so well.

I’m in a new phase with the fandom right now, because I’m working within the wizarding world again, on Fantastic Beasts. Once again, I’m balancing wanting to interact with fans, with not being able to answer certain questions fully, because we’re only two films into a five film series. It’s a nice problem to have, though.

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Q: Do you create as much detail beyond what we see in the Fantastic Beasts films as you did for the Harry Potter books?

A: Warner Bros had optioned the rights to the Fantastic Beasts years previously, so I knew that it might one day become a movie, but the only discussions we’d ever had about it were quite vague. I do remember thinking that if anything ever came of it, I’d have to make sure they got Newt Scamander right, because even though he never appeared except as a name within the Potter books, I knew a lot about him. He’d captured my imagination while I was writing his little book. I envisioned a doggedly different, awkward man who was at a loss with humans but phenomenally skilled with beasts.

As for Dumbledore and Grindelwald, I knew a huge amount more than ever appeared in the books, and this is my chance to show/tell some of it. Of course, in a film, one is revealing a story in a very different way than one does in a novel. Sometimes a single look does the job of three paragraphs. As readers of the original books will know, the pair of them don’t meet for a long time between their teenage interactions and their epoch-making confrontation in 1945. Nevertheless, we’ll be exploring their backstory in the films.

Q: What kinds of ‘beasts’ are we dealing with here – human or animal?

A: The idea of beasts works on several different levels within the movies. There’s the literal sense of non-human creatures: some of them cute, some of them terrifying, some simply strange. Then there is the metaphorical sense of the beast inside a man, the crude emotions that a manipulative genius like Grindelwald knows how to stoke and use. We’re also dealing with the idea of beastly people:  that some humans are something less than human.  Even where there is great charisma and intelligence, there may be an utter lack of conscience. Finally, I’m exploring the idea of creating beasts, which is to say, othering or dehumanising our fellow people, as the first step towards cruelty or extermination.

So through this beastly landscape walk our original four characters, led by the shambling figure of Newt Scamander, who loves the purity of creatures that the world might call monsters. The human world around Newt and his friends is becoming darker and more complex, and the original hunt for escaped creatures will become a hunt for something much more elusive and difficult: a return to humanity.

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1. How do you manage two very different fictional worlds (Cormoran Strike and the Wizarding World) and two very different formats (books and screenplays)?

I’ve never had any problem moving between fictional worlds, even if I’m working on them simultaneously. There can be a lot of hanging around waiting for notes on the draft of a movie script, so I like to have a novel on the go in the background.

I envision the different fictional worlds as different rooms to which I have access. At worst, when entering one of the rooms, I have to spend a bit of time re-orientating myself, finding my bearings again, checking what I’ve put in which drawers. However, they’re discrete places in my head, and the moment I re-enter one of the worlds, the characters are as fully real to me as when I left them. Cormoran Strike has never reached for a magic wand, and Newt Scamander doesn’t limp or drink Doom Bar.

The difference between screenplays and novels is more challenging. It isn’t that one is intrinsically easier than the other, but that I’m far less used to writing the former, whereas novels and I are old friends.

2. What comes first, plot or character? 

I’m most interested in character, but plot usually comes first. I need to know the broad outline of the story before I start hatching characters. Having said that, a couple of stories have grown out of a single character. Character can be plot.

3. How do you come up with titles and how important are they?

Titles usually suggest themselves, but coming up with them always make me nervous. I think they’re quite important, which adds pressure. I have no idea what the third Beasts movie will be called, even though I already know the whole story. On the other hand, I already know the titles of the fifth Galbraith book and the children’s story I’m writing next.

4. Does the process of making film and TV put pressure on you to write faster, and do audiences’ reactions influence where you go with plot and how you develop characters? 

Fan reactions to Harry Potter were both exhilarating and overwhelming, often at the same time. I saw it as my job back then to make sure that I arrived at the ending I had planned for the series before the first book was even published. The final destination was hugely important to me, for reasons that were both personal and artistic, and I plotted a course towards it despite being subjected to a lot of (almost entirely good-natured) buffeting from readers.  Part of the fun of a series is the way people invest in the relationships from book to book (or film to film), and I love the fact that people have strong opinions on what should happen next. On the other hand, I never set pen to paper without knowing way more than will eventually appear on the page or screen, and I usually have a fairly strong idea of where I’m going, that won’t change.

In the case of the Beasts movies, I’m writing original screenplays, so there’s a practical need for the work to be done by a specific date so that filming can commence on time.

Where the Cormoran Strike novels are concerned, and even though I love the TV adaptations, I still finish the novel when it’s ready, no sooner! When I agreed to the books being adapted for TV I made it clear that the books would come as and when Robert Galbraith chose. Luckily, he loves writing them, so we should hopefully be seeing Strike on TV for some time to come.

5. Why choose Twitter rather than a well-placed press article or interview to make your opinions known?

Well, firstly that assumes that my main objective in tweeting is to ‘make my opinions known’ rather than what I think most people’s reason is for being on Twitter, which is to engage with other people, to debate and joke. I think for a lot of well-known people, it’s a bracing dose of normality.  Nobody’s shy about telling you you’re an idiot. Twitter’s a great leveller. It isn’t for everyone, but nearly all the writers I know love it, because they’re in their own medium.

There’s a time and a place for a press article, but tweeting is something that happens for me on writing breaks. At its best, it’s fun and fascinating. People in all their diversity and strangeness interest me more than anything else on the planet, and Twitter is as good a place as I’ve ever found for seeing human nature in the raw!

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1. What are you writing right now?

I’ve just finished the fourth Galbraith novel, Lethal White, and I’m now writing the screenplay for Fantastic Beasts 3. After that I’ll be writing another book for children. I’ve been playing with the (non-Harry Potter/wizarding world) story for about six years, so it’s about time I get it down on paper.

2. What is a typical writing day?

I try to start work before 9am. My writing room is probably my favourite place in the world. It’s in the garden, about a minute’s walk from the house. There’s a central room where I work, a kettle, a sink and a cupboard-sized bathroom. The radio is usually tuned to classical music, because I find human voices the most distracting when I’m working, although a background buzz, as in a café, is always comforting. I used to love writing in cafés and gave it up reluctantly, but part of the point of being alone in a crowd was being happily anonymous and free to people-watch, and when you’re the one being watched, you become too self-conscious to work.

The earlier in the day I start, the more productive I am. In the last year or two I’ve put in a couple of all-nighters on the screenplays for Fantastic Beasts, but otherwise I try and keep my writing to the daytime. If I’ve started around nine, I can usually work through to about 3pm before I need more than a short break. During this writing time, I generally manage to drink eight or nine mugs of tea. Being incredibly clumsy, prefer eating things that won’t ruin the keyboard when dropped. Popcorn’s ideal.

3. You have collaborated on several projects. How does that work?

By nature I’m quite solitary, so novels and I suit each other perfectly, but the collaborations I’ve been involved in have been pure joy, mainly because of the people involved.

For ten years I said no to proposals to adapt Harry for the stage, usually as a musical, and using the existing books. So when I met producers Sonia Friedman and Colin Callender, I wasn’t sure what I was going to hear. I only knew that they wanted to do something new, which was intriguing, because I had no desire to go endlessly back over old ground.

I couldn’t have asked for better collaborators on the stage play than John Tiffany (director) and Jack Thorne (writer). Incredibly, John and I knew each to say hello to years ago, when I used to write in the café at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh. When we met for the first time about Cursed Child, I stared at him, thinking, he looks so familiar, where have I met him? And he told me, and the whole thing felt oddly fated.

I told John and Jack what I thought had happened to Harry, Ron and Hermione in later years, explained how focused I was on Harry’s son Albus, who’d been given the burden of not one, but three legendary names, and together we created the story that Jack wrote.

I have so many wonderful memories of the earliest rehearsals, of seeing the costumes and illusions for the first time, but what I remember most fondly about the three of us working together is the laughter. I loved the process from beginning to end.

I particularly remember the first full dress rehearsal I watched. By this time I knew the script backwards, had heard it read all the way through and watched individual scenes acted, but nothing prepared me for seeing it in its entirety, in the theatre. I found it incredibly moving and it brought back a tsunami of memories about the seventeen years I spent creating the characters and writing the Harry Potter books. John and Jack did a superb job. Very few people have come inside the world with me and it creates a particular bond.

The big difference between theatre and movies for me is scale. When I go down to WB Studios Leavesden and see a thousand people at work on Fantastic Beasts, building sets, making costumes, doing digital effects, making models and props and all the hundreds of other things that go into making a movie, it can feel utterly overwhelming. Terrifying thoughts run through your mind, such as, I must not break an arm, because all these people’s jobs depend on me getting the screenplay finished.

However, at the heart of the process is a very similar collaboration to the one I had on Cursed Child, this time with David Yates, the director, and Steve Kloves, who was the writer on seven of the eight Potter films and is a producer on Beasts.

In spite of the fact that I’d watched Steve close up for all those years, I found screenwriting utterly different from novel writing and very challenging at first. Basically, I learned how to write a screenplay as I went along, knowing that the movie was definitely going to be made, which is, to say the least, atypical. Steve gives great, pithy notes. The one that made me laugh longest was when I had a character in a cut scene in an early draft say, ‘They’re children!’. He said, ‘Yeah, unless we’ve got the casting badly wrong, that’ll probably be obvious.’

David knows the world of Potter intimately now, after directing four of the eight original movies. I love working with him. I learn a lot just listening to him talk about images. Even though I have a highly visual imagination, I’ve had to learn just how much can be said onscreen without a word, and David and Steve have taught me that.

The thing with movies is, however frustrated you get with the screenwriting process, and right at the moment when you think ‘never again, this is too hard’, you go down to the film set and join in with one big glorious game of pretend, with the world’s best pretenders saying your words, and dressing out of the most fabulous dressing up box, and what with the lights and the smoke and the music you’re suddenly in love with the process all over again.

4. What exactly is your role as producer? How much say do you have in the look and feel of the films?

Warner Bros and David Yates, the director, have always let me have my say, though not necessarily the final word. That’s true of all the producers, of whom I’m only one: our input is taken seriously but it is very much a collaborative effort.  The director is ultimately responsible for everything that’s seen on the screen. As the screenwriter, the majority of my input comes at an earlier stage.

5. Do you write for readers or for yourself?

This is a tricky question in some ways, because a writer who truly only wrote for themselves probably wouldn’t try and get published. At the same time, I agree with Cyril Connolly’s words: ‘Better to write for yourself and have no public, than write for the public and have no self.’

I certainly write ‘for myself’ in the sense that I have to write. It’s almost a compulsion. I need to do it. I don’t feel like myself if I’m not writing regularly, and I feel restless and odd if I have nothing to write, which these days is never, because I’ve got so many different projects on the go, by choice. I also write for myself in that I need to feel excited about a story to want to capture it on paper. I’m afraid I couldn’t write anything just because I knew people wanted it. The impetus always has to come from within.

On the other hand, no story lives unless someone is prepared to listen. As a writer, your highest aspiration is to touch people, to connect, to amuse or console. What could be more wonderful than hearing that your book helped somebody through a tough time? I think of the times when books have been my best consolation and source of strength, and I’m proud beyond words when I hear that anything I wrote did the same for other people.

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Once upon a time, JKRowling.com was a cosy corner of cyberspace where I could share things I was writing, answer readers’ questions, debunk baseless press stories and be as serious or as frivolous as I fancied on any given day. However, when I finished writing the Potter books, my website fell into disuse. I spent a few years writing, not publishing, and enjoying the quiet. A few years ago I resurrected JKR.com, but I didn’t feel the same connection to the new design and it showed, because I hardly ever wrote anything for it.

So I decided to start over. I wanted to bring my website back to what it used to be: something real and personal. This is a faithful representation of my writing desk, except that I haven’t put on the bits of stale popcorn and biscuit crumbs that usually litter the surface. Everything looks a bit tidier and cleaner than it really is, but after all, it’s only polite to make an effort for guests. The various objects littered around really do live in my writing room; some of them have sentimental value, some are practical and others have found their way in via friends and family members.

I write in a room I built in my garden, at a wooden table just like this, with a view of lawn and trees. Family members have to decide whether they’re prepared to make the effort to put on shoes or find an umbrella to come and find me, which makes it the perfect distance from the house: I’m neither accessible enough to be bothered every time a Nintendo DS gets mislaid, nor so inaccessible that I can’t be inside the house and tending to a broken leg within thirty seconds.

(I’m married to a doctor, so yes, I accept that he might be the more logical choice to deal with the broken leg, but Neil might be at work when this happens. Or maybe it’s his leg that’s broken. All right, I accept this isn’t entirely rational: I’m a worrier.)

You’ll find my Twitter feed on here, because Twitter has become for me a nice way of interacting with readers in the website-free years. It also slakes my thirst for pictures of dogs and otters, political arguments and random connections with strangers, which are hard to come by when your profession demands that you sit alone in a room for many hours a day.

I haven’t forgotten the debunking function that I found so useful on my old website, though you might not find the button right away. You’ll also find links to some of the causes and charities I support, including my own charity Lumos, and my charitable trust, Volant.

2016 has been one of the busiest professional years of my life. I didn’t plan for the stage play Harry Potter and the Cursed Child and the movie Fantastic Beasts and Where To Find Them to come out in the same year, but that’s what ended up happening, with the result that 2016 meant an almost total re-immersion in the wizarding world. I’ve been absolutely delighted with the reception of both pieces: the stakes are always very high when you return to a well-loved creation, and after almost a decade of refusing to do spin-offs or remakes, I feel overwhelming relief that both long-time fans and newcomers have enjoyed what we’ve done. Pottermore.com, the digital hub for the wizarding world, does a great job catering for anyone who wants to dig deeper into that world.

Robert Galbraith, my crime writing alter-ego, remains active, and is currently working on his fourth. There’s no publication date as yet, given how busy 2016 has been, but I’m making steady progress. Cormoran Strike fans will be glad to know that filming has already started on the TV adaptation, starring Tom Burke as Cormoran and Holliday Grainger as Robin Ellacott.

With four more Beasts movies to come, I decided my Christmas gift to wizard-lovers should be to answer some of the most frequently asked questions about the plot of the new franchise. There’s also a bonus FAQ, an oldie about Chamber of Secrets that I’ve been asked at least once a week for nine years.

I hope you enjoy your visit and if I don’t see you again before the end of December, I wish you a very happy new year!

FAQs

1.     Why couldn’t Newt just Apparate to the USA? Why did he go by boat?
Apparition becomes increasingly risky over long distances. As with most magic, much depends on the skill of the spell-caster: Apparition requires knowledge of the terrain to which one is moving, or the ability to visualise it clearly. Cross-continental Apparition would almost certainly result in severe injury or death.

Moreover, the beasts in Newt’s case had varying magical natures. Some could have Apparated with him, but others could not.

2.    Why did Newt go in through No-Maj customs?
He was transporting magical creatures at a time when this was illegal. No-Majs were far easier to fool than the wizarding checkpoint would have been.

3.    Why couldn’t Newt use ‘Accio’ to retrieve all his beasts?
‘Accio’ only works on inanimate objects. While people or creatures may be indirectly moved by ‘Accio-ing’ objects that they are wearing or holding, this carries all kinds of risks because of the likelihood of injury to the person or beast attached to an object travelling at close to the speed of light.

4.    Why isn’t Veritaserum used in interrogations?
It is, but skilled wizards can avoid its effects by using antidotes and charms. A gifted Occlumens could also resist Veritaserum.

5.    Why did ‘revelio’ undo the effects of Polyjuice Potion?
It didn’t. Grindelwald’s Transfiguration surpasses that of most wizards, so he used a spell, not a potion, to take on the appearance of Percival Graves.

6.    Why didn’t Harry Potter develop an Obscurus?
An Obscurus is developed under very specific conditions: trauma associated with the use of magic, internalized hatred of one’s own magic and a conscious attempt to suppress it.

The Dursleys were too frightened of magic ever to acknowledge its existence to Harry. While Vernon and Petunia had a confused hope that if they were nasty enough to Harry his strange abilities might somehow evaporate, they never taught him to be ashamed or afraid of magic. Even when he was scolded for ‘making things happen’, he didn’t make any attempt to suppress his true nature, nor did he ever imagine that he had the power to do so.

And finally, an oldie but a perennial favourite…

7.    Why wasn’t the Horcrux inside Harry destroyed when he was bitten by the Basilisk in Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets?

A Horcrux can only be destroyed if its container is damaged beyond repair. Harry was healed by Fawkes. Had he died, the Horcrux would indeed have been destroyed.

PS I’m being asked all kinds of excellent questions about Fantastic Beasts that I can’t answer right now, because the answers would give away too much about future plots. If your burning question isn’t here, you are probably safe to assume that it will be answered in the sequels!

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