Even J. K. Rowling Has To Deal With Fear And Change

​I've always found J.K. Rowling to be a fascinating woman, particularly after hearing her Harvard commencement speech in 2008. On the eve of the release of her first book for adults, The Casual Vacancy, and the first book after the Harry Potter series, Ian Parker writes a revealing in-depth profile of Rowling for The New Yorker. 

I asked her if publishing the new book made her feel exposed. “I thought I’d feel frightened at this point,” she said. “Not just because it’s been five years, and anything I wrote after Potter—anything—was going to receive a certain degree of attention that is not entirely welcome, if I’m honest. It’s not the place I’m happiest or most comfortable, shall we say. So, for the first few years of writing ‘The Casual Vacancy,’ I kept saying to myself, ‘You’re very lucky. You can pay your bills, you don’t have to publish it.’ And that was a very freeing thought, even though I knew bloody well, in my heart of hearts, that I was going to publish it. I knew that a writer generally writes to be read, unless you’re Salinger.” After all the fretting—“Christ, you’re going to have to go out there again”—she discovered that she was calm. “I think I’ve spent so long with the book—it is what I want it to be,” she said. “You think, Well, I did the best I could where I was with what I had.” She laughed. “Which is a terrible paraphrase of a Theodore Roosevelt quote.”

​It seems Rowling is very shy and despite the success of the Potter series still has to confront the fears of creating work and putting it out into the world. 

“I read “The Casual Vacancy,” which is five hundred and twelve pages long, in the New York offices of Little, Brown, after signing a non-disclosure agreement whose first draft—later revised—had prohibited me from taking notes. (With this book, Rowling was hoping for a “more run-of-the-mill publishing experience,” but that hope goes only so far.) Within a few pages, it was clear that the novel had not been written for children: “The leathery skin of her upper cleavage radiated little cracks that no longer vanished when decompressed.” A little later, a lustful boy sits on a school bus “with an ache in his heart and in his balls.” But reviewers looking for echoes of the Harry Potter series will find them. “The Casual Vacancy” describes young people coming of age in a place divided by warring factions, and the deceased council member, Barry Fairbrother—who dies in the first chapter but remains the story’s moral center—had the same virtues, in his world, that Harry had in his: tolerance, constancy, a willingness to act.”

The profile is worth the long read. In it you'll learn the through-line between Potter and Vacancy ("Mortality and morality",) where the title of the new novel comes from and above all that Rowling is very much a writer who is going to continue writing other books, for adults and children, of which the Potter series was simply the beginning. 

Simon Schama: Why I write

Orwell’s four motives for writing still seem to me the most honest account of why long-form non-fiction writers do what they do, with “sheer egoism” at the top; next, “aesthetic enthusiasm” – the pleasure principle or sheer relish of sonority (“pleasure in the impact of one sound on another”); third, the “historical impulse” (the “desire to see things as they are”), and, finally, “political purpose”: the urge to persuade, a communiqué from our convictions.

To that list I would add that writing has always seemed to me a fight against loss, an instinct for replay; a resistance to the attrition of memory. To translate lived experience into a pattern of words that preserves its vitality without fixing it in literary embalming fluid; that for me has been the main thing.

Simon Schama, writing for the Financial Times, delves into what inspired him to become a writer and discusses some of his favorite writers and passages. Despite his love for words and writing, my favorite work produced by Schama is his documentary series The Power of Art. It features eight artists -- Caravaggio, Bernini, Rembrandt, David, Turner, Van Gogh, Picasso, and Rothko -- and each portrait of the artist weaves biography and historical context to help explain the true power of his works.​

Knowledge + Taste = Meaningful Judgement

Like any other kind of writing, criticism is a genre that one has to have a knack for, and the people who have a knack for it are those whose knowledge intersects interestingly and persuasively with their taste. In the end, the critic is someone who, when his knowledge, operated on by his taste in the presence of some new example of the genre he’s interested in—a new TV series, a movie, an opera or ballet or book—hungers to make sense of that new thing, to analyze it, interpret it, make it mean something.

A Critic's Manifesto by Daniel Mendelsohn, writing for The New Yorker​.

Building Our New Shrines

This is what we’ve always done: we build our shrines. We build our shrines sometimes before we even have content. We build our shrines before we know what that content will look like.

We love our shrines. We love crafting them, sanding them, staining, and lacquering them. We craft and then fill them with our precious stuff—words and images. And then we think, Ah! I need to add those pieces of lint, those little doodads in the corner: the share button and email button, the like and +1 and retweet buttons. We stick them in the corners of our shrines because we built our shrines without them, sometimes before they existed.

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What is a publisher anymore, anyway? A blog is a magazine. A magazine a blog. A newspaper a WordPress install. A Twitter account a journalist.

Another great essay by Craig Mod exploring the ways and the tools we build to create "our shrines." He has consistently and thoughtfully been looking at the evolution of creating published content. ​

Tim Carmody on the Past, Present and Future of Reading

Tim Carmody at TOC 2012: Digital reading is firmly part of the mainstream. Whether it’s on the web, in an app, or packaged as an e-book, more readers all over the world are starting with a screen. But mainstream audience and still-quickly evolving standards are a recipe for anxiety for readers and publishers alike. This keynote examines how readers’ experiences and expectations are changing in response to the new digital reading landscape, and how and why editors and publishers can address those expectations and soothe those anxieties. 

(via Explore)​