JK Rowling on art and perseverance

I’ve always considered  JK Rowling an outlier. Not only because HP was such an incredible success, but also because it’s a brilliant, deeply human story told over so many years, set in a world so full of life and detail, that you know it took incredible talent and effort to write these stories.

JKR spotted a comment on Twitter that clearly struck a chord: “HEY! YOU! You’re working on something and you’re thinking ‘Nobody’s gonna watch, read, listen’. Finish it anyway.”

And she went into advice mode.

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.)

I’ve shown this to quite a few friends this week, and some of them argued that JKR has had it easy: she didn’t have to wait for her fiftieth novel to break out. Nevertheless, if there ever was a case for creating something for the sake of creating it, then I submit that JKR has made it. Onward, and keep making good art.

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