J.K Rowling is legendary. She is legendary not just for Harry Potter and the Sorcerers Stone, but for six other Harry Potter books and one unrelated new book this Summer.
If you read the Harry Potter series, you know Voldemort had his soul torn into seven different pieces. Those seven pieces were part of him. Likewise, the seven books are a part of Rowling and in essence, it is those seven pieces that turned Voldemort and Rowling into a legend.
Does Rowling need to write another book? Of course not. She’s set. The fact she is writing another defines what it means to be a writer. Being a writer doesn’t mean you work hard to produce one book and win big on that one book.
Rowling couldn’t have done it with just one Harry Potter book, there’s no legacy in that, no passion. It would just have been a book that she wrote and that’s it. It doesn’t matter if you have a book inside you anymore. One book doesn’t cut it, one book doesn’t make you an income you can live off of the rest of your life and one book definitely does not create a legacy.
Every legendary writer you can think of has published more than one book, has written more than one essay, has bled more than one poem. Writing a book doesn’t make you a writer, writing a book is average, millions of people do it. Very few write seven like Rowling, 40+ like Stephen King or have more than 1,000 published like L Ron Hubbard.
There is a highlight to reaching this realization. It makes writing that first book easier. See, too many people spend thousands of hours on their first book hoping to make it big. They spend more time editing than they do learning how to write better when learning how to write better is much more important because the more you write, the less you will need to edit. The less you need to edit, the more you can write and the more you can write, the more books you can have written.
Rowling, King, and Hubbard published a lot of work before their novels hit the status of legendary. They wrote endlessly and everything they started making was ugly until they made so much ugliness that it became beautiful and eventually legendary.
Having a book inside you and wanting to be a legendary writer are two different things. Unless of course, every time you vomit that book inside you, another takes its place.
Stay Positive & Stick Your Fingers Down Your Throat If You Have To
(just get that first book out and see if another takes its place)
Garth E. Beyer
