JK Rowling on "Failure"

Been thinking about taking up my dream of writing fiction again, and for some reason I wiki'ed JK Rowling this morning, having only heard snippets of her life story on the road to success.

Here's an excerpt from Wikipedia, on what was going on in her life at the time she began writing the first of the Harry Potter series:

After working at Amnesty International in London, Rowling and her then-boyfriend decided to move to Manchester.[22] In 1990, while she was on a four-hour-delayed train trip from Manchester to London, the idea for a story of a young boy attending a school of wizardry "came fully formed" into her mind.[38] She told The Boston Globe that "I really don't know where the idea came from. It started with Harry, then all these characters and situations came flooding into my head."[22][38] When she had reached her Clapham Junction flat, she began to write immediately.[22][39]

In December of that year, Rowling's mother died, after ten years suffering from multiple sclerosis.[22] Rowling commented, "I was writing Harry Potter at the moment my mother died. I had never told her about Harry Potter."[20] Rowling said this death heavily affected her writing[20][40] and that she introduced much more detail about Harry's loss in the first book, because she knew about how it felt.[41]

Rowling then moved to Porto in Portugal to teach English as a foreign language.[8][30] While there, on 16 October 1992, she married Portuguese television journalist Jorge Arantes. Their child, Jessica Isabel Rowling Arantes (named after Jessica Mitford), was born on 27 July 1993 in Portugal.[42] They separated in November 1993.[42][43] In December 1993, Rowling and her daughter moved to be near Rowling's sister in Edinburgh, Scotland.[22] During this period Rowling was diagnosed with clinical depression, and contemplated suicide.[44] It was the feeling of her illness which brought her the idea of Dementors, soul-sucking creatures introduced in the third book.[45]

***Check this out, below!!!***

Seven years after graduating from university, Rowling saw herself as "the biggest failure I knew."[46] Her marriage had failed, she was jobless with a dependent child, but she described her failure as liberating:

"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 to 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 area where I truly belonged. I was set free, because my greatest fear had been realized, and I was still alive, and I still had a daughter whom I adored, and I had an old typewriter, and a big idea. And so rock bottom became a solid foundation on which I rebuilt my life." – J. K. Rowling, Harvard commencement address, 2008.[46]

***This absolutely gave me chills, and reiterates some of the things I talked about with my therapist yesterday. Each of us has a precious opportunity because we've been set free. What we choose to do with this freedom will make all the difference.

Love to all of you on this board, and thanks again for the support of the last few days.