How Joan Rowling invented Harry Potter

This amazing story happened in 1990. Not too successful, a twenty-five-year-old Englishwoman named Joan Rowling came up with the image of the young wizard Harry Potter, who became famous throughout the world and made his creator one of the richest and most famous women on the planet. And these amazing events began in the most prosaic place - a crowded train car Manchester - London

After graduating from university in Exeter, the modest and inconspicuous girl Joan Rowling got a job as a secretary in the charity organization Amnesty International. Perhaps the only thing she liked in this work was the ability to secretly type in invented stories on her office computer.

Harry Potter: Character Birth

Once, at the end of the weekend, she returned to London from Manchester, where she settled with her then-young man. Suddenly, a new character appeared in her imagination - a thin dark-haired boy with glasses and a scar on his forehead. At the same time, he had no idea what powerful magical abilities he had

.

However, Joan did not even have a pen with her, and for four hours she simply came up with new details for such a sudden appearance. That evening, the future famous writer began working on her first Harry Potter book. Gradually, Harry had his own world, full of friends and enemies. Familiar Joan Rowling became prototypes of fairy-tale characters, and sometimes she herself.

For example, the diligent and all-knowing Hermione resembles the writer herself as a child, Severus Snape is one of her school teachers, and Zlatopust Lokons is not the most pleasant of Joan's acquaintances.

Joan Rowling found unusual names for her characters among the scientific names of plants, heroes of medieval legends, on geographical maps, dictionaries, even on monuments to victims of the war. Harry received his surname in honor of a childhood friend of the writer, and Severus Snape is the name of one of the English villages.