J.KJ.K. Rowling’s Top Tricks for Working Magic With Your Writing

 

1. Believe in Magic. Okay, not literally (at least, unless you do). But this tip is just about believing in yourself as a writer, the content you create, and your ability to keep going. Take it from J.K.: she had always wanted to be a writer, and she kept inventing stories until people read them (and boy, did they read them). To make it as a writer, you have to believe you’ve got the magic it takes to make words come alive on the page. It all started out as a dream for J.K. Rowling, too. Hear the world-renowned author talk about her pie-in-the-sky idea of becoming a writer.
2. Treat writing like it’s your job. This is true whether writing is, in fact, your job, or whether you just want it to be. Treating it like a job means setting aside time to finish what you need to do. Some authors give themselves strict daily word limits (Mark Twain averaged right around 1,800). J.K. hasn’t talked about giving herself a word limit, but she has made it clear that she puts in her time. Since she hit the big time with Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (Sorcerer’s Stone, in the American edition) and managed to make it her full-time gig, she’s careful to put in her eight hours a day—even if that sometimes means working through the night. But before that, when she was a single mom on social assistance, sometimes it was all she could do to snatch a spare moment to scribble a stray idea.