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| Who is J.K. Rowling? |
Authors: Pam Pollack and Meg Belviso
Illustrator: Stephen Marchesi
Being an aspiring
writer, I bought it immediately when I saw it in the bookstore yesterday night
to see if there is anything I can learn from her. It’s a very good biography;
the writers use very simple language making it very readable. The entire book
is also richly illustrated. Since the Harry Potter books are a big part of her
life; hence a great part of the book is dealing with how the books are
produced. If you want to be a fantasy novel writer, I strongly recommend it.
Here are tips I learn from the books about writing a
fantasy:
Founts of her inspiration are her imagination, life
and books
A lot of her ideas for the stories are actually from
her imagination, life, and books, for example, after she broke up with her
boyfriend, she thought it would be satisfying to smack something at her
boyfriend, perhaps with a big iron ball while riding on a broomstick. That’s
how Quidditch was created. When she was
feeling down, her friend Sean Harris who is the real-life inspiration of Ron
Weasley, would drive her to the countryside with her turquoise Ford Anglia that
car became the car whose save Harry in the second book of Harry Potter series.
It’s just that the one in Harry Potter books can fly. She lived in Tutshill when
she was nine. The Forest of Dean and Chepstow castle are near from her house;
they gave her a lot of ideas for her story. So did the many books she read.
Among them, her favorites are The Little White Horse, and The Chronicles of
Narnia. The former is a about a girl solving the feud of her magical family,
while the second is about a group of children ruling a magical kingdom.
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Names of the characters, Spell, and the origins of the
plans
The character names of Harry Potter are related to
their characters. The book has about three pages talking about it. As for the
spells, spells like, Accio, Expecto Patronum, and Confundo are based on Latin.
Many ingredients in Harry Potter potions class are real. She learnt about many
of the herbs and plants in Harry Potter in Culpeper’s
Complete Herbal (Alphabetical
index of the book, http://www.complete-herbal.com/culpepper/completeherbalindex.htm)
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Writing Skills
Jane Austen was her favorite Author. Rowling commented
on Emma, “The most skillfully managed mystery I’ve ever read.” It’s the kind of
mystery that the main character realizes that they the wrong ideas about
everything, and need to go back to see how things really are. She like the way
she put clues in the books about what was going to happen that the reader didn’t
notice until the end. She read the books again and again and tried to learn to
do the same thing.
Harry Potter books are really the reason of her work.
It took her seven years to finish them since she first had the idea of Harry
Potter. When she was writing the book, she wrote every chapter and rewrote
every chapter.
I
really believe the key to her success is her passion for writing. She has
always wanted to be a writer. She wrote a story of her sister falling down a
rabbit hole when she was seven. She told her friends made-up adventures when
she was in Wyedean Comprehensive. She wrote when she has time during her work.
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