

While writing the sixth book, Half-Blood Prince, Rowling said: ‘You Have to Plan’Įven when Rowling was nearly finished with the Potter series, she still extensively outlined her work. It’s like learning an instrument, you’ve got to be prepared for hitting wrong notes occasionally, or quite a lot, cause I wrote an awful lot before I wrote anything I was really happy with. You have to resign yourself to the fact that you waste a lot of trees before you write anything you really like, and that’s just the way it is. But perhaps the feeling will have worn off by next summer. I am so sick of re-reading that I’ll be hard put to smile when it comes to doing public readings from it.


Rowling’s goal as a writer is surprisingly simple: “ better than yesterday.” When Rowling sent her editor an email about the third Potter book, she wrote:
