Pat Williams is the senior vice president of the NBA's Orlando Magic. One of America's top motivational, inspirational, and humorous speakers, he has addressed employees from many of the Fortune 500 companies and the Million Dollar Round Table. Pat has been featured in
Sports Illustrated, Readers Digest,
Good Housekeeping, Family Circle,
The Wall Street Journal, Focus on the Family,
New Man Magazine, plus all of the major television networks, The Maury Povich Show and Dr. Robert Schuller's Hour of Power.
Ruth Williams is an inspirational and motivational speaker and a consultant with the Franklin-Covey organization, who speaks to organizations nationwide. She has trained and managed thousands of people in various aspects of professional and personal development. She has worked with such companies as American Express, Chase Manhattan Bank, CitiBank, Nextel Communications, the U.S. Navy and Air Force, Home Shopping Network, World Omni Lease, Lockheed Martin, Ryder Trucks, the PGA Tour and State Farm Insurance. She is currently pursuing a Ph.D. in organizational leadership.
Michael Mink is a freelance writer who coauthored
How to Be Like Women of Influence.
J. K. Rowling
1965–
Passion
Keep writing and throwing it away until
one day you do something that you don't think
belongs in the [trash bin]. Stick to writing
what you know about. Don't give up.
—J. K. Rowling
In the beginning of the wildly successful Harry Potter series, Harry is a young boy who has no idea of the power he possesses as the wizard he doesn't yet know he is. Likewise, there was an untapped magic and wonder in author Joanne Kathleen "J. K." Rowling. Rowling, although she had loved to write from the time she was a little girl, had no idea of the immense talent she possessed and the powerful influence she would have to change the literary world—and the real one. As a result, Rowling, through her Harry Potter books, has enriched the lives of children and adults alike worldwide.
She spent years writing the first Harry Potter book and plotting out the next six without knowing (not even having a hint) that her untold hours of hard work would amount to anything. She was unpublished, with no connections and no agent. Yet even as a financially strapped single mother, struggling to support herself and her child, she still made time to write. She wrote for the pure love of it. Her dream was to be a published writer, and she admits that she didn't think she had much of a chance to realize the dream.
Was she ever wrong!
"This is my life's ambition, and I've overshot the mark so hugely," Rowling said in Lindsey Fraser's Conversations with J. K. Rowling.
Born July 31, 1965 in Chipping Sodbury, England, Rowling's literary rise was meteoric. In July 1997, her first book, Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (called Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone in the United States), was published. By July 1999, there were 30 million copies of her first three books in print. By 2000, 76 million copies, and by 2004, the total had reached 250 million copies of the first five books. By her fortieth birthday, Rowling was one of the wealthiest people in the world with a fortune estimated at $1 billion. Today there are over 400 million copies of Rowling's seven Harry Potter books in print. According to Forbes magazine in 2006, she is the first author-billionaire.
"I still know that I'm an extraordinarily lucky person, doing what I love best in all the world," Rowling said.
Her secret to success, however, wasn't magic or luck. It was born instead of an old-fashioned work ethic.
Harry Potter was created on a train ride and, in a way, so was Rowling. Her eighteen-year-old parents met on a train departing King's Cross Station in London in 1964. They sat near each other on their nine-hour trip to Arbroath in Scotland and instantly fell in love. And like the magical train ride that Harry takes to the huge castle known as Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry, Rowling, too, experienced a train ride that changed her life and the lives of her readers.
In June 1990, Rowling was returning to London from Manchester by train. As she gazed out the window and watched the countryside go by, she had what she says was the purest stroke of inspiration she had ever had in her life. At this point in her novice career, Rowling had written many short stories and two adult novels. She worked on the novels while supporting herself as a secretary, but she felt neither manuscript was good enough to warrant finishing.
Harry's story was different, however. She imagined an eleven-year-old boy wizard who lived among mortals, not knowing his true powers. Orphaned, Harry was raised in a heartless manner by his nonmagical aunt and her pompous husband.
With that idea to go on, Rowling said she needed to answer the question of why Harry is where he is when the story starts. Eventually, she developed the backstory about the lightning bolt–shaped scar on Harry's forehead and how it provided the key clue to his past. When the evil wizard Voldemort killed Harry's wizard parents, Lily and James, he didn't possess enough magical power to kill the infant Harry. Weakened in the attempt, the dreaded Voldemort did manage to leave the distinctive scar on Harry's brow. In the magical world yet unknown to him, the scar serves as proof that Harry is legendary among wizards as "the boy who lived."
The never-before-published Rowling decided by the end of that fateful train ride that she would write seven Harry Potter books. They would correspond to the seven years Harry spends at Hogwarts. She rode the enthusiasm of her vision and started writing that very night.
In a sense, Rowling had been preparing for that moment her entire life. Many of the greatest minds of civilization have written about the value reading played in their lives and successes. Rowling's parents served as an example to her because they both loved to read. "My mother was a huge reader and never happier than when she was curled up reading. That was a big influence on me," she recalled. In Rowling's case, reading certainly taught her how other writers told their stories, and these stories expanded her own imagination.
Today, with her busy schedule, Rowling still makes time to read. When O, The Oprah Magazine asked, "With so much on your plate, when do you find time to read?" Rowling responded, "I never need to find time to read. When people say to me, 'Oh, yeah, I love reading. I would love to read, but I just don't have time,' I'm thinking, how can you not have time?"
Early in her life Rowling was not only reading children's books but also books such as Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, which she tackled at age eight. She was nine when she read Ian Fleming's James Bond thriller Thunderball. By her late preteens, she had read Jane Austen's Pride and Prejudice, and by age fourteen she conquered William Thackeray's Vanity Fair—all very sophisticated fare for a young girl. One book series that impacted her writer's imagination greatly was The Chronicles of Narnia by C. S. Lewis. Other favorite childhood authors included Paul Gallico, Noel Streatfield, and E. Nesbit.
As a young adult, she was moved by Charles Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities and inspired by the Lord of the Rings trilogy by J. R. R. Tolkien. Dickens's works frequently concerned matters of social injustice, and Tolkien wrote of epic battles between good and evil in imaginative realms. Both of these are important and recurring themes in the Harry Potter series.
Rowling says she was most influenced by the writings of Jessica Mitford. Her great aunt gave her Mitford's autobiography, Hons and Rebels, when Rowling was fourteen years old. Known as the "queen of the muckrakers," Mitford wrote extensively about social injustice. Rowling admired the way she lived her life and the courage she displayed as a human rights activist—courage that sometimes put Mitford in harm's way.
"[Mitford] showed her passion by acting on what she believed, not preaching. . . . I think I've read everything she wrote. I even named my daughter after her," Rowling noted. Mitford's courage ultimately permeated Rowling's novels as an essential character trait of Harry Potter and his two best friends, Ron Weasley and Hermione Granger.
Another key book Rowling read during childhood was Elizabeth Goudge's The Little White Horse. Rowling remarked that the more she read this book, the more clever it became. Likewise, surprises abound on each page of the Harry Potter books. Rowling says of The Little White Horse on her website, "Perhaps more than any other book, it had a direct influence on the Harry Potter books. The author always included detail of what her characters were eating, and I remember liking that. You may have noticed that I always list the food being eaten at Hogwarts."
Like Goudge, Rowling meticulously planned her books. She created all of her characters and their backstories as if she knew them as living, breathing people. "Sirius Black is a good example," Rowling wrote, "I have a whole childhood worked out for him. The readers don't need to know that, but I do. I need to know much more than them because I'm the one moving the characters across the page."
She filled one notebook with nothing but notes about Quidditch, a thrilling wizard's team sport that Harry and his classmates play at Hogwarts. Rowling also put extensive effort into naming the unique places and things surrounding her characters and very carefully selected the names of her characters.
As she wrote Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone, she also planned the plotlines for the next six novels. In addition, as she worked on the early novels, she wrote the last chapter of the seventh book—before the first novel was even close to completion. This prewriting of the final chapter of the last book served as Rowling's tangible commitment to herself that all the books would be completed. Her tremendous love of her work and belief in her ability to bring it to fruition drove her to invest significant time and energy to write her story the way she wanted it to be written. This is especially exceptional given the bleak financial circumstances she endured while she was writing.
In the summer of 1991, Rowling moved to Oporto, Portugal. After the death of her mother and the loss of her job, she wanted to get away. She found a position in Oporto teaching English in the afternoon and evenings and devoted her free mornings to continuing the work on the first Harry Potter book.
Drawing from her real-life experience of losing her mother, who was only forty-five, Rowling said that Harry's feelings about his dead parents became "much deeper, much more real. In my first weeks in Portugal, I wrote my favorite chapter in Philosopher's Stone, 'The Mirror of Erised.'" In the magic mirror, young Harry sees himself living happily with his parents. His greatest childhood desire (the mirror's name, Erised, is the word desire spelled backward) can be reflected back to Harry, but—like all illusions—it can never be realized.
At this time, Rowling realized her own desire for a family. ...
