J.K. Rowling has made a rare update to her website in which she answers a bunch of questions.
In a new tab on her site titled “Answers,” Rowling takes on four questions in a single blog post. Most notable is the answer to the first question: What is she currently writing?
Rowling reiterates that she’s finished writing the fourth book in the Cormoran Strike series, and that she’s currently writing the Fantastic Beasts 3 screenplay. But the third part of her answer is most interesting: After she finishes FB3, she’ll write a children’s book that she’s been developing for six years.
“After [FB3] I’ll be writing another book for children,” she says. “I’ve been playing with the (non-Harry Potter/wizarding world) story for about six years, so it’s about time I get it down on paper.”
Rowling appears to say that it’s a single book as opposed to a new series, though we not-so-secretly hope it’s the latter (Could you imagine learning Rowling’s writing another children’s series??). It’ll be her first since the final Harry Potter.
In four other questions, Rowling addresses a typical writing day, collaborating with others, whether she writes for herself or readers, and explains her role as a producer on the Fantastic Beasts series.
On who she writes for, Rowling says she constantly has a desire to put pen to paper. “I certainly write ‘for myself’ in the sense that I have to write,” she says. “It’s almost a compulsion. I need to do it. I don’t feel like myself if I’m not writing regularly, and I feel restless and odd if I have nothing to write, which these days is never, because I’ve got so many different projects on the go, by choice.”
It’s the collaboration question that gets the biggest response from the author — the answer finds Rowling reminiscing over the development of Harry Potter and the Cursed Child.
“I particularly remember the first full dress rehearsal I watched,” she writes. “By this time I knew the script backwards, had heard it read all the way through and watched individual scenes acted, but nothing prepared me for seeing it in its entirety, in the theatre. I found it incredibly moving and it brought back a tsunami of memories about the seventeen years I spent creating the characters and writing the Harry Potter books. John and Jack did a superb job. Very few people have come inside the world with me and it creates a particular bond.”
On collaborating for Fantastic Beasts, Rowling admits that screenwriting is a difficult process, but her team has helped her immensely:
“David [Yates] knows the world of Potter intimately now, after directing four of the eight original movies. I love working with him. I learn a lot just listening to him talk about images. Even though I have a highly visual imagination, I’ve had to learn just how much can be said onscreen without a word, and David and Steve have taught me that.”
“The thing with movies is, however frustrated you get with the screenwriting process, and right at the moment when you think ‘never again, this is too hard’, you go down to the film set and join in with one big glorious game of pretend, with the world’s best pretenders saying your words, and dressing out of the most fabulous dressing up box, and what with the lights and the smoke and the music you’re suddenly in love with the process all over again.”
Hopefully her website’s new “Answers” section is going to be receiving regular updates!
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