DARE TO DREAM BIG: From Welfare Mother to Billionaire Author

Imagine This: You are nearly penniless, severely depressed, divorced, and trying to raise a child on your own in a mouse-infested apartment while attending school and writing a novel. Your novel is rejected by twelve publishers, but you don’t give up your writing!

 You were born in Yate, England, and you enjoy making up stories for your younger sister Di and her friends. You write your first story at age six—-a story about a rabbit named Rabbit.

 When you’re nine, your family moves to an old stone house in the country next to a cemetery. On your first day at your new school, the class is given a math test to determine who is bright and who is not, so the students can be assigned to seats according to their scores.

 You fail the test because you’ve never learned fractions, so the teacher moves you to the “dim” row. You’re very embarrassed, but you study hard and, by the end of the year, you’re allowed to sit in the “bright” row. Meanwhile, you continue to read books and write your stories.

 Your last two years of high school are marked by two major disappointments. Your mother is diagnosed with multiple sclerosis, a serious and disabling disease that attacks the brain and the spinal cord, and you’re denied admission to Oxford University even though you’ve done well on your entrance exams.

 Instead of going to Oxford, you attend the University of Exeter where you study literature and French. You’ve always wanted to be a writer, but after college, you need a job, so you take different secretarial jobs to support yourself while you write in your spare time.

 On the train ride back to London one Sunday evening in June 1990, the train breaks down and the image of a character for a book comes to you. The characters, the setting, and the story just “pop into your head.” You have no pencil or paper and you’re too shy to borrow any from fellow passengers, so for the next four hours, you close your eyes and give your imagination free reign while you “write” the story in your mind.

 By the time you step off the train in London, you know it will be a seven-book series, and you give your main character some of your own traits, including the same birthday.

 While teaching English as a second language to students in Portugal, you marry a Portuguese journalist and in 1993, you have a daughter you name Jessica. Your marriage doesn’t work out and your life hits rock bottom.

 You move to Edinburgh, Scotland, to be closer to your sister where you and your daughter live on welfare in a mouse-infested apartment. You’re as poor as is possible without actually being homeless and you consider yourself a “failure.”

 But you don’t give up your writing! By late 1995, you complete your first book in the series and type all ninety thousand words of it on a secondhand manual typewriter.

 You find an agent who begins sending your book out to publishers. Twelve publishers reject your book, but finally in 1996, Bloomsbury agrees to publish it. They want the book to appeal to boys as well as girls, so they use your initials J.K. rather than your name Joanne.

 Bloomsbury publishes only one thousand copies of your first book, half of which are distributed to libraries. But your luck is about to change! Every year a big book fair is held in Bologna, Italy, where European publisher display their books and auction off foreign rights to their books. Arthur Levine, the editorial director of Scholastic Books, enters the bidding war for your first book and submits the winning bid of $105,000.00 for the American rights to publish your first book in the United States. The sale makes publishing history. Never before has anyone paid so much for the right to publish a children’s book.

 Both Bloomsbury and Scholastic sign contracts for the entire series of seven books and the rest, as they say is history!

 Sales of your books skyrocket and adults, as well as children, are reading them all over the world. Your books are made into movies, and you become one of the most famous and beloved authors in the world. You have inspired a generation of young people to read books and to tap into their own imaginations, and you have shown how a lot of hard work and a little luck can lead to magical results!

 “It is impossible to live without failing at something, unless you live so cautiously   that you might as well not have lived at all in which case, you fail by default.”

                                                          J.K.Rowling (1965-    )

 For More about J.K.Rowling:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ewmYoYhutE4

 Giving Back: J.K. Rowling is a generous philanthropist and contributes generously to numerous causes including cancer centers in Scotland, the Multiple Sclerosis Society of Scotland, and the National Council for One Parent Families.

 Did You Know that J.K. Rowling’s favorite author is Jane Austen?

 Something to Think about: Why do you think J.K. Rowling never gave up on her writing even after she considered herself a “failure?”

 Willoughby and I hope you enjoyed this week’s true story and will be back next week for another story to inspire you to DARE TO DREAM BIG!