While it’s hard to think about now, J.K. Rowling was once a struggling single mother who had very little for a considerable amount of time. There was a seven-year period in her life that followed and saw the death of her mother, birth of her first child, divorce from her first husband and relative poverty until she finished the first novel in the Harry Potter series. Remember that before Harry Potter, Rowling, like many writers today, received a ton of rejection before making it big as a writer. The manuscript for Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone was famously rejected 12 times before ending up with Bloomsbury.
As you all know Rowling is extremely active on Twitter so yesterday, when she saw a person who was giving advice to aspiring writers, Rowling decided to chime in. Here’s what she wrote:
There were so many times in the early 90s when I needed somebody to say this to me. It’s great advice for many reasons. Even if it isn’t the piece of work that finds an audience, it will teach you things you could have learned no other way. (And by the way, just because it didn’t find an audience, that doesn’t mean it’s bad work.) The discipline involved in finishing a piece of creative work is something on which you can truly pride yourself. You’ll have turned yourself from somebody who’s ‘thinking of’, who ‘might’, who’s ‘trying’, to someone who DID. And once you’ve done it you’ll know you can do it again. That is an extraordinarily empowering piece of knowledge. So do not ever quit out of fear of rejection. Maybe your third, fourth, fiftieth song/novel/painting will be the one that ‘makes it’, that wins the plaudits but you’d never have got there without finishing the others (all of which will now be of more interest to your audience.
If there’s one person to listen to out there with regards to writing advice, you might want to take the word of someone who’s made over a billion dollars in the business.
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