by Davina Lennon

Created on: July 22, 2010

J.K. Rowling had a total belief in herself and the stories she wrote. Her excellent imagination and descriptive style of writing sets her apart from so many other authors. She didn’t just write a story about wizardry and witchcraft, she created an admirable tale extolling the virtues of good and evil, love and hatred, life and death. Harry Potter goes beyond your typical children’s story; it contains all the dramas of childhood uncertainty, exploration and danger.

 So how did J.K. Rowling create such a successful narrative that has enthralled an audience of both adults and children, selling over 400 million copies worldwide and made her the only dollar billionaire author alive today?

The author, herself, has said that she drew on many parts of her own childhood to create her magical stories. At the age of nine she moved from the suburbs of Chipping Sodbury, South Gloucestershire, UK, to a country area near the Forest of Dean. This location presented an assortment of creative ideas for the fledgling writer. She viewed the forest as a place of so many things, enchanting, solitary even spooky. She was very drawn to the whole environment of a forest and says it was her favorite part of the Hogwarts ground.

 Her mother suffered from multiple sclerosis and died during the first six months of her writing the first installment of Harry Potter. It was this loss that gave an extra touching moment to the death of Harry’s own mother in her book.  Although the plot line never changed, the devastation of losing her mother created a deeper and darker stance to the stories.

 After a brief marriage to a journalist collapsed, with which she had a daughter, she gave way to a period of depression. For J.K. Rowling it was this feeling of deep despair that inspired her to create unpleasant and offensive characters to add to her book. Harry Potter became the classic hero who stood against evil and upheld his moral stance to defeat the oppressive forces of the dark arts of Lord Voldermort

 Determination to succeed in her tireless efforts of creating a fantasy tale, enhanced with the deep feelings of her own life, spurned her on. She totally loved all of her characters and had no misconceptions of killing them off or making them into bad people. She catered for an audience that had been deprived of such great writing for a long time. All the Harry Potter books have inspired a generation of children to read, not just one book but seven books. J.K. Rowling’s years struggling on welfare, raising her baby, trying to write a story that was compulsive to read, filled with wonder and excitement and created by such a fantastic imagination, is worthy of the success she has attained.

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