Harry Potter author J. K. Rowling
Author J. K. Rowling says she wrote the last chapter of the last Harry Potter book first, around the time when she initially conceptualized the famous saga back in 1990, while riding a train from Manchester to London.
If you were going to write a story, where would you start?
When a certain monarch in Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland was asked a similar question by a White Rabbit, he responded gravely, “Begin at the beginning, and go on till you come to the end: then stop.”
But must all stories begin at the beginning?
The Bible does. In fact, it starts off quite simply, “In the beginning …”
And yet, God – being the ultimate author of a very long and suspenseful drama – surely already had an ending in mind before he ever breathed the world into existence. Otherwise, how can one explain Revelation?
Authors are indeed gods of their own little worlds. They govern everything from the arch demons to the seasonal climates. They play chess with the lives of fictional friends, wage wars, end wars, and have the power to cause even the most treacherous seeming of souls – like Snape or Darth Vador – to turn good just in the nick of time.
“What a piece of work is a man, How noble in
Reason, how infinite in faculties, in form and moving
how express and admirable, In action how like an Angel!
in apprehension how like a god, the beauty of the
world, the paragon of animals. and yet to me, what is
this quintessence of dust? Man delights not me; no,
nor Woman neither; though by your smiling you seeme
to say so.”
– The Tragedy of Hamlet, Prince of Denmark (Act II, Scene ii, 285-300)
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