J.K.Rowling - Insights on Creating Harry Potter world

it was five years from the train journey where i had the original idea to finishing the book and during those five years this mass of material was generated some of which will never find its way into the book we'll never need to be in the books it's it's just stuff i need to know for my own pleasure partly for my own pleasure and partly because i like reading a book where i have the sense that the author knows everything they might not be telling me everything but you have that confidence that the author really knows everything okay so this is um to the untrained eye might look like a pile of waste paper but um this is 10 years work as you can see i file meticulously and i know where every single piece of paper is i've dragged out a few bits and pieces so this is the name of everyone in harry's year and all these little symbols mean what house they're in how magical they are what their parentage is because i needed this later for the death eaters and so on and the various allegiances that would be set up within the school i like this this was agent this was 98 and this was me trying to find words for the dementors so i have all these latin words written all over the inside of my diary i used to cover just about anything with writing as you can see this is my application for housing benefit in 28 gardeners crescent which is where i the first place i lived obviously when i was in edinburgh um treated with a complete lack of respect by me discarded first chapters of book one i reckon i must have got through 15 different alternative chapters but one the reasons for which i discarded each of them were they all gave too much away and in fact if you put all those discarded first chapters together almost the whole plot is explained this is an old notebook in which i worked out [Music] and again i don't want you to come too close on this that is the history of the death eaters where's my portuguese diary god there it is so this is a portuguese diary as you can see not filled in [Music] because i've never filled in a diary in my life but it had paper in it to write on so we have another draft book one chapter one [Music] i drew a lot of pictures i drew them for no one but me i just wanted to know what what characters look like so anyway that was argus filch no prizes snape obviously that is um harry arriving in privet drive with professor mcgonagall and hagrid and dumbledore that was a gringotts cart miravera said that's the wheezes [Applause] professor sprout i like this one i thought i'd lost this picture actually because i was going to show it to chris columbus and true to form i only found it when it was no use and they'd already already filmed that bit anyway but this is how the entrance to the diagonality works in my imagination so chris is going to murder me when he finds out i had a blueprint all along and he was asking me how it worked but it was buried in books and that's in effect what i did it was a question of condensing and editing and sculpting a book out of this mass of stuff that i had on harry and i thought that if it got published i really thought it's a book for obsessives it's a book for the kind of people who enjoy every little tiny detail about world because i have every little tiny detail about the world hogwarts school of witchcraft and wizardry first-year students will require one three sets of plain work robes two one plain pointed hat black for day wear three one pair of protective gloves dragon hide or similar [Music] four one winter cloak black silver fastenings set books the standard book of spells by miranda goshawk a history of magic by batilda bagshot magical theory by adalbert waffley a beginner's guide to transfiguration by emmerich switch one thousand magical herbs and fungi by philadelph magical drafts and potions by arsenious fantastic beasts and where to find them by newt scamander the dark forces a guide to self-protection by quentin trimble [Music] other equipment one wand one cauldron pewter standard size two one set glass or crystal files [Music] one telescope one set brass scales students may also bring an owl or a cat or a toad [Music] as jk rowling continued to build harry's world

Channel: Melanie Wass

Views: 134,893

Keywords: harry potter, jk rowling, creating worlds, fantasy fiction writing

Id: 3qTKRZ9qilU

Length: 5min 43sec (343 seconds)

Published: Mon Sep 16 2019