JK Rowling: The Fringe Benefits of Failure
on February 13th, 2011
J.K. Rowling Speaks at Harvard Commencement from Harvard Magazine on Vimeo.
I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless….I was the biggest failure I knew…failure meant a stripping away of the inessential. I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged.
Complete transcript at Harvard Magazine. Official Harvard Magazine embed. © J K Rowling.
She knows of what she speaks. Most certainly.
It’s funny, she’s the main reason I don’t participate in the Nanowrimo local meetups — the one meeting I went to I just made an offhanded comment about JKR and got a lecture on what a horrible, awful person she is, terrible mother and welfare cheat, yadda yadda yadda. I just backed away from the crazy as fast as reverse mode would let me and I never went back. Then I donated my page count to a random region rather than have it count toward the Las Vegas chapter; crazy don’t get any help from me and those people don’t know shinola from that other stuff.
/gets off soapbox, mops up
Oh, for crying out loud.
Man, jealousy is an ugly, ugly thing.
I missed all the British tabloid stories about how Rowling beat her kids and drove a Rolls Royce while on the dole.
I bet she has paid enough into the British tax system to support 1,000 needy families.
Someone needs to STFU.
Wow, can we count the possible causes of jealousy?
She’s an attractive WOMAN who is successful.
She’s a woman writer who has managed to keep good control of her intellectual property and NOT get screwed by Big Business.
She’s managed to write well enough that she engages millions of readers in her creation (get a clue, dudes – she’s connecting with something).
After years of scraping by (and being rejected by publishers), she’s now fabulously wealthy BECAUSE of her work. She didn’t “just luck into it.”
Yeah. “Quiet in the Peanut Gallery, please!”
I have this lovely fantasy that one morning all of the Envy People wake up, and their craniums collapse into the black hole of their dense jealousy.
It’s a beautiful dream.
*whispers* Rowling too? I thought they reserved that crapola for Meyer.
Alas, everyone gets their share of the hatey hate. No matter how much they are deserving of luvluvluv.
It comes along in most every arena, I think. I have a director friend who has worked hard on jobs, mostly working on faith-based films (he’s done a few for the Billy Graham organization). He got the opportunity to direct a small-budget feature film once. Someone we knew at church, who said he was writing a play about Eric Little’s missionary service in China (a play I don’t think he’s ever completed), commented to another person that my friend Michael was “just lucky”. Very sour grapes, because Michael had paid his dues – doing PA work, having his script coopted once by the director when he was starting out, spending many years shooting special effects model shots (he shot the subway crash sequence in SPEED). No luck involved, just a lot of hard work.
That’s the nature of envy – wanting what the other person has (without bothering to do the work to actually earn the whatever.
It’s always so pathetic to run across this.
I don’t get it. Hell, I even give props to people I don’t like, or who I think are not very nice people. Give the devil their due.
But I confess I notice when someone I don’t like does a really bad job.
Heh- give the devil their due- reminds me of this.
When I was completing my undergrad, I worked for Academic Services as work-study. One spring day, circa 1999, I was cleaning ceiling vents in this big open area on the fourth floor and a cop walked by.
A couple minutes later, another cop. Then two more. One walked up to me and said, “You want to be somewhere else right now.” I replied, “Brother, you don’t have to tell me twice. What’s going on?”
He half smiled and said, “You’ll find out soon enough.”
Turns out one of the students had come somewhat unhinged and had built a bomb.
His roommate caught on and called the cops. They took him away, found the bomb, and set it off in a safe canister like they do.
The reports were that it would have destroyed all the fourth floor, most of the third and part of the second.
A bunch of us were hashing it out afterward. My friends were in shock that such a thing could happen, and what a disturbed individual this guy must have been.
“Well, let’s be fair,” I said. “This is an art school. Let’s at least give the guy points for craft!”
Then we started doing a crit of the bomb, and we all felt a bit better.
BWAHAHAHAAH!!! Oh, man, gotta show that to my dad!
In the gloating department, someone from my dark past came out of some sort of semi-retirement with the first new project in, I dunno, decades.
What little I saw of it was eye-bleeding awful.
It was so bad, that my gloat turned to pity. I felt like I’d given the devil a cool glass of water.
Oh, yeah. I’m human enough to want to hold on to some of my dislikes. But sometimes, you do just have to pity people who cannot “get with it.”
The wannabe playwright I mention was drowning in his research. He didn’t know how to stop. We had a Chinese woman who ran our Deacons office at the time, and he was asking her how various things would be said in Chinese – whole speeches. I didn’t say it out loud, but I was wondering “Why would it matter? You’re not writing the play to be performed in China, it’s to be performed here, in English. You want the audience to know what the characters are saying.” Because from the sound of what he was requesting, he was so focused on “being authentic” that he’d lost sight of the fact he was supposedly creating something to affect the audience.
(That instance has been on my mind lately, because next Saturday I’ll be on a panel about doing research, with Harry Turtledove and Barbara Hambly. I’ve been thinking of all the ways “doing research” can go wrong.)
But back to point: I do try to keep to specifics if I’m going to criticize. And criticizing someone because they have a huge audience? Why? Even if you don’t respect the work, the person is obviously tapping into something the audience wants. I can’t figure out the appeal of Dan Brown’s work, but I’m not going to knock him for somehow hitting something readers want.