We’ve all heard ad nauseam that the Harry Potter story “simply fell into [Rowling’s] head” and “all of the details bubbled up in [her] brain.” She was “besieged by a mass of detail.” She “[had] never felt such a huge rush of excitement and [she] knew immediately that [Harry Potter] was going to be such fun to write.” Sounds like a fairy tale beginning to a fairy tale ending for Rowling, doesn’t it?

Perhaps that fairy tale is all an ordinary reader needs to know about Rowling’s path to literary fame and fortune, but us writers need to know much more than that. In fact, it’s absolutely vital for us—for our own writing sanity—that we hear the not-so-glamorous version of what it was like to write Harry Potter.

What It Was Really Like Writing Harry Potter

Us writers need to realize how disciplined Rowling had to be in order to develop her story nugget into seven hefty books. We have to know that Rowling wasn’t simply sitting in a quiet cafe for two decades capturing words flowing out of her pen like the literary Fountain of Youth.

Why do we need to know this? Because if we didn’t, it would be scarily easy to convince ourselves that we would write more too, if only we had the life and success Rowling had. Realizing what it was really like for Rowling to write Harry Potter reminds us that it isn’t success or money or free time that separates writers from non-writers. The only thing that separates writers from non-writers is that writers write.

For this blog post, I’ve compiled the oft-forgotten, non-fairy tale version of the story behind Harry Potter, taking into account not only what Rowling was dealing with in the publishing world but also in her personal life.

A writer who waits for ideal conditions under which to work will die without putting a word on paper. —E. B. White Tweet

Book One: Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone

Even though Harry Potter strolled into Rowling’s head fully formed, she still spent several years mapping out the seven-book series before writing the first of the bunch, Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone. It took Rowling a year to write Sorcerer’s Stone. She rewrote the first chapter so many times—upwards of fifteen discarded drafts—that her first attempts “bear no resemblance to anything in the finished book.”

Rowling’s writing time was also entirely contingent on her infant daughter, Jessica:

Whenever Jessica fell asleep in her [stroller], I would dash to the nearest cafe and write like mad. I wrote nearly every evening. Then I had to type the whole thing out myself. Sometimes I actually hated the book, even while I loved it.

And Rowling had to spend a frustrating amount of her already limited writing time on nuisances like having to re-type an entire chapter because she changed a paragraph or, even worse, having to re-type the entire manuscript because she realized too late that she hadn’t double-spaced it.

But all of that is only the writing side of Rowling’s life. Along with those setbacks, Rowling was struggling with many personal problems at the time: the death of her mother, estrangement from her father, a volatile and short-lived marriage, a newborn child, a life on welfare, and a battle with clinical depression. Rowling has said that her private life was so out of sorts that she grappled with suicidal thoughts and had to turn to therapy for help.

Therapy was one of the only outlets for Rowling because her support system during this first book was nearly nonexistent. Rowling realized that few people would understand her drive to write Harry Potter. She related that she once told a friend about her manuscript: “I think she thought I was deluding myself, that I was in a nasty situation and had sat down one day and thought, I know, I’ll write a novel. She probably thought it was a get-rich-quick scheme.”

After finally finishing the manuscript, Rowling had to wait another year and collect a dozen rejection letters before Bloomsbury Publishing picked up the book—but even then Rowling was warned by her literary agent to find stable work outside of writing because her story wasn’t commercial enough to be successful. (“You do realize, you will never make a fortune out of writing children’s books?”)

In fact, even Bloomsbury’s expectations were so low that the book’s initial print run was only 500 copies—300 of which were given to public libraries for free. Rowling’s first royalty check was 600 pounds. A year later she was a millionaire.

You’d fail only if you stop writing. —Ray Bradbury Tweet

Book Two: Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets

Both Rowling’s agent and Bloomsbury Publishing had to (happily) eat their words—Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone turned out to be so successful in the U.K. that Scholastica paid an unprecedented $105,000 for the American rights to the series. Even with this unexpected good fortune, though, Rowling’s life wasn’t magically free of roadblocks and distractions.

For one thing, while attempting to write this second book in the series, Rowling suffered from her first and only debilitating bout of writer’s block.

I had my first burst of publicity about the first book and it paralysed me. I was scared the second book wouldn’t measure up …

While these lucrative international contracts did relieve Rowling from the burden of poverty, they also placed an incredible amount of pressure on her “to fulfill the expectations that all of the publishing houses had of [her].”

And let’s not forget how the sudden appearance of money can turn one’s life upside down: Everyone was now asking Rowling for a financial leg up, which left her feeling panicked.

When I signed the [Scholastica] book contract for Harry Potter, I came into an enormous amount of money practically overnight. It triggered a tsunami of requests for money, as you can imagine. I was completely overwhelmed. And I suddenly felt responsible in many different ways. … I was downright paranoid that I would do something stupid …

Rowling now had more money than she had ever expected, but she was still suspicious of this early success and wasn’t ready to financially commit to being a full-time author. While writing Chamber of Secrets, Rowling also worked as a French teacher and continued to be the sole caretaker of her now-toddler daughter. Money hadn’t slowed down the chaos and she still had to find the time to write.

A professional writer is an amateur writer who did not quit. —Richard Bach Tweet

Book Three: Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban

With a sigh of relief, the second Potter book was even more successful than the first one, and Rowling finally dove in to full-time writing with the third book, Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban.

Rowling has said that this was one of the most enjoyable books in the series to write, but she still had to work very hard to produce a good story. In a letter to her editor, Rowling wrote: “I’ve read [Prisoner of Azkaban] so much I’m sick of it. I never read either of the others over and over again when editing them, but I really had to this time.” In a later letter to the same editor, Rowling added: “The hard work, the significant rewrites I wanted to do, are over, so if it needs more cuts after this, I’m ready to make them, speedily …”

But if Rowling thought the rewrites were difficult for this book, she was about to be hit by a literary ton of bricks with Book Four.

The desire to write grows with writing. —Desiderius Erasmus Tweet

Book Four: Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire

Again Rowling churned out a book in one year and again the book was a smashing success. Rowling, however, dealt with all of this success in a rather unexpected way:

The first thing that I did when I finished Prisoner of Azkaban was discuss repaying the advance for the [fourth] book. Yes, you can imagine. People were a little bit shaken, I think. I said: I want to give the money back and then I will be free to finish in my own time rather than have to produce it for next year.

Rowling’s problems with this fourth book are well-documented. She has openly said that Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire was the most difficult one in the series to write, claiming that it almost caused her to have a “nervous breakdown.”

That was the period where I was chewing Nicorette. And then I started smoking again, but I didn’t stop the Nicorette. And I swear on my children’s lives, I was going to bed at night and having palpitations and having to get up and drink some wine to put myself into a sufficient stupor.

Rowling attributed much of this stress to the staggering amount of pressure she felt to produce another Potter book worthy of global adoration.

I’m sure that I’ll never have another success like Harry Potter for the rest of my life, no matter how many books I write, and no matter whether they’re good or bad. I remember very clearly that I was thinking the same thing when the excitement over the fourth Harry Potter volume literally exploded. The thought was unsettling to me at the time, and I still feel that way today.

Unfortunately, it was exactly during this explosion of international acclaim that Rowling struggled with the plot for the first time since starting the series.

The first three books, my plan never failed me. But I should have put [this] plot under a microscope. I wrote what I thought was half the book, and “Ack!”—huge gaping hole in the middle of the plot. I missed my deadline by two months. And the whole profile of the books got so much higher since the third book; there was an edge of external pressure.

Rowling went on to say that she had “some of [her] blackest moments with this book.”

At Christmas I sank to the depths: “Can I do this?” I asked myself. In the end it was just persistence, sheer bloody mindedness. It took months. I had to unpick lots of what I’d written and take a different route to the ending.

She also said that the worst ever rewrite she’s had to pull through was one particular chapter in Goblet of Fire.

I hated that chapter so much; at one point, I thought of missing it out altogether and just putting in a page saying, “Chapter Nine was too difficult” and going straight to Chapter Ten.

It was during this time that Rowling, understandably, struggled with burn-out.

Goblet of Fire was an absolute nightmare. I literally lost the plot halfway through. My own deadline was totally unrealistic. That was my fault because I didn’t tell anyone. I just ploughed on, as I tend to do in life, and then I realised I had really got myself into hot water. I had to write like fury to make the deadline and it half killed me and I really was, oh, burnt out at the end of it. Really burnt out. And the idea of going straight into another Harry Potter book filled me with dread and horror. And that was the first time I had ever felt like that. I had been writing Harry for 10 years come 2000 and that was the first time I ever thought, Oh God, I don’t want to keep going.

If I waited till I felt like writing, I’d never write at all. —Anne Tyler Tweet

Book Five: Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix

Rowling stayed true to her word and took some time off to relax—kind of. She stepped away from Harry Potter but worked instead on a completely unrelated book (which hasn’t been published). After this yearlong sabbatical, Rowling returned to the Potter series with the fifth book, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix.

Rowling had written the first four Potter books in a blisteringly fast five years, but she told her publishers that, after dealing with the plot issues in Goblet of Fire, she didn’t want a deadline with this fifth one. Of course the publishers had to agree.

Even with no deadline, though, Rowling was still crunched for time. She’s repeatedly said that she wished she had better edited this book: “I think Phoenix could have been shorter. I knew that, and I ran out of time and energy toward the end.”

It’s no wonder that Rowling ran short on time and energy. Not only did she write an 896-page beast of a book in two years, but she also got married, had a baby, fought a bogus plagiarism lawsuit, started several charity organizations, contributed massive input to the new Potter films, and generally ran around fulfilling her endless PR obligations. And if all that weren’t enough, Rowling was also drowning in an overwhelming amount of media attention.

By this time Rowling’s fame had grown to such bewildering levels for an author that she was being relentlessly pursued by the paparazzi, which was quite a shock to her since, as she said at a press conference for the Sorcerer’s Stone, she thought she’d written something that only “a handful of people might quite like.”

Rowling has been outspoken about her struggle to cope with her sudden onset of fame:

Everything changed so rapidly, so strangely. I knew no one who’d ever been in the public eye. I didn’t know anyone—anyone—to whom I could turn and say, “What do you do?” So it was incredibly disorientating.

Rowling was having to confront the paparazzi digging through her garbage, hiding in her hedges, and camping out in front of her house. One reporter even slipped a note into her daughter’s backpack at school. Rowling said, “It’s very difficult to say … how angry I felt that my 5-year-old daughter’s school was no longer a place of … complete security from journalists.”

Rowling felt like she was “racing to catch up with the situation” and “couldn’t cope” with the fact that the paparazzi were going after her private life: “I couldn’t grasp what had happened. And I don’t think many people could have done.”

And during all of this professional and personal uproar, Rowling was expected to churn out another Harry Potter homerun.

The secret of becoming a writer is to write, write, and keep on writing. —Ken MacLeod Tweet

Book Six: Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince

Again Rowling’s Potter book met and exceeded all expectations, smashing records left and right. It was on to Book Six.

Rowling was pregnant with her third child while writing Half-Blood Prince, but luckily this time she wasn’t feeling nearly as much pressure or stress. In fact, she probably put some fans in a panic when she said, “I’m in a very lovely position. Contractually, I don’t even have to write any more books at all. So no one can possibly write that I have missed a deadline because I actually don’t have a contractual deadline for Six and Seven.” Of course Rowling did write Book Six, calling it “an enjoyable experience from start to finish.”

Outside of her four writing walls, however, Rowling’s critics were growing as vocal as her fans. Rowling said, “I found death threats to myself on the net. … I found, well, people being advised to shoot me, basically.”

Rowling’s personal situation with the paparazzi was also spinning out of control. After the birth of her two children, David and Mackenzie, Rowling couldn’t even leave her house without being stalked by photographers, saying she was “completely trapped.” The hounding at her doorstep became so intense that she felt like she was “under siege or like a hostage” and was forced to sell her house and move her family.

All of this media attention eventually snowballed to such a claustrophobic level that Rowling again had to turn to therapy as she once did years ago when her Harry Potter story was in its infancy:

Sometimes I think I’m temperamentally suited to being a moderately successful writer, with the focus of attention on the books rather than on me.

You just have to accept that it takes a phenomenal amount of perseverance. —J. K. Rowling Tweet

Book Seven: Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows

Despite all of those setbacks, Rowling again reached astounding success with her sixth Potter book, and she immediately began working on the seventh one. Even though this book was the final in the series, Rowling still had many other responsibilities on top of just writing, like being a mother to three children, giving interviews, overseeing the Potter movies, and running her charities. Since gaining notoriety and wealth, Rowling’s writing time had ironically been cut in half from five days a week to two and a half days a week.

There are times—and I don’t want to sound ungrateful—when I would gladly give back some of the money in exchange for time and peace to write.

And of course there was still the constant onslaught of the press, which was exceptionally draining for Rowling:

Fame is a very odd and very isolating experience. And I know some people crave it. A lot of people crave it. I find that very hard to understand. Really. It is incredibly isolating and it puts a great strain on your relationships.

One of the media’s particular criticisms of Rowling was her appearance. Rowling said, “I found it very difficult, when I first became well known, to read criticism about how I look, how messy my hair was, and how generally unkempt I look.” In a post on her website, Rowling worried about how criticisms like those would affect her daughters:

Is “fat” really the worst thing a human being can be? Is “fat” worse than “vindictive,” “jealous,” “shallow,” “vain,” “boring” or “cruel'”? Not to me.

I’ve got two daughters who will have to make their way in this skinny-obsessed world, and it worries me, because I don’t want them to be empty-headed, self-obsessed, emaciated clones; I’d rather they were independent, interesting, idealistic, kind, opinionated, original, funny—a thousand things, before “thin.”

And somehow, in the middle of all this cacophony, Rowling finished her seven-book series. Nearly two decades later, it was over. She said, “I cried as I’ve only ever cried once before in my life and that was when my mother died. It was uncontrollable …”

My feeling is, if you really want to [write], you will do it. You will find the time. And it might not be much time, but you’ll make it. —J. K. Rowling Tweet

Appreciate Where You Are in Your Writing Journey

This post was not about glorifying Rowling, or pitying her. This post was about learning to appreciate where you are in your writing journey. It’s only human to think that the grass is greener on the other side—to think that if we only had that writer’s life or this writer’s money, we’d finally make it work. But books aren’t written in a vacuum. Life doesn’t stop moving even when the most famous and successful writers sit down at their desks. The best time to write is now—because that’s the only time you can truly count on. As the famous poem goes:

For of all sad words of tongue or pen,

The saddest are these: “It might have been!”