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January 11, 2008
Write Like Rowling? A lot of writers wish they could conjured up something as successful as the Harry Potter series. Recently I was visiting Edinburgh and happened to stop in a coffee shop called the Elephant House that claims to be one of the places where Rowling wrote some of her early work. Rowling was a single mom, having gone though a divorce that left her to care for a small child while existing on public support. Without much money and no good place to write, she started going to local coffee shops where she stayed for hours writing her stories while caring for her baby in a stroller next to her table.
If you visit the Elephant House today you’ll find that it indeed sets the mood for the Potter series since it sits in a quaint Edinburgh neighborhood with a churchyard view out the window and sitting in the shadow of old castles. Another thing you’ll find are would be writers at various tables with laptops or yellow legal pad writing their hearts out. They are trying to capture that magic the Rowling found in the coffee house. Whether any of them will find it, I don’t know.
As a writer myself I ordered a cup of hot tea and watched a while. The shop was filled with an almost white noise hub-bub of people discussing various things from office matters to politics to gossip. I can imagine that Rowling saw more than one of her characters pass through the coffee shop door, and probably snatched a phrase or two from conversations that surrounded her in the shop.
What then, I wondered, could I learn from her experience. As a desperate housewife – well at least as a desperate mom trying to eek out a living by doing something she lived she had something that many of us do not have – she had desperation – she was hungry to make something happen. Think back – she had no idea at that time that the Harry Potter stories could catch on. I’m sure she hoped they would. I’m sure like many of us writers she had visions that they might bring in enough for her to move into a nice apartment and care for her child. But she didn’t know, couldn’t know what was in store.
Therefore, she had to be desperate to make it work. And, she had some time on her hands. I imagine that the initial story took a lot of her thought process. She observed people, wrote down ideas as they occurred to her and built a series of characters. I image she read some of the other popular stories of the era. It occurred to me as I was reading the Douglas Adam’s book The Long Lost Tea Time of the Soul that came out in the 1989 era that there were some similarities – in that book a man goes to a railway station and somewhere between the tracks steps into a parallel place occupied by old Norse gods. In fact, it is revealed that walking around among the people of London are a number of people that look like you and I but are really Norse gods. I don’t know for a fact – but since this book was on the shelves at the same time Rowling was writing the first Harry Potter its possible that she got an idea from it. No surprise. That’s what any thinking author does – he or she reads something that gives them an idea and they turn it around, change the characters and make it into something unique.
What did I learn by sitting the Elephant House watching the wannabe Rowlings? I think I learned that any writer has to find a place – whether physical, emotional or spiritual – where creativity can happen. You’ve got to keep your antennae up – listening for ideas, reading ideas, hearing ideas. You have to actively and purposefully capture those ideas in a journal, on little slips of paper or in a Word document. And you have to be hungry. How may times have people asked me how to get published. I think of the old joke “How do you get to Carnegie Hall?” The answer is of course “Practice, practice, practice.” It is the same with writing. How to you get published – you have to write, write, and keep writing. Like practicing a musical instrument, you should be writing under some mentor that is helping you improve little by little.
I’m doubt if I’ll ever make the big bucks like JK (can I call her that?), but I can be sure of this – without diligence, practice, and improvement the chances of getting published are slim to none.
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