"Harry Potter and Me" offers insights

In a 2001 interview with the BBC, Jo Rowling tells the story of how, after the publication of The Chamber of Secrets, she received a stern letter from a parent who basically told her the violent and scary ending of the second book was unacceptable and that the parent expected better from Rowling in the upcoming third novel.

Rowling's reaction is wonderful. She becomes very angry, even though several years had passed between the incident and her recounting of it to the BBC.

"I'm not taking dictation here," she says after a moment. "Do I care about my readers? Profoundly and deeply. But do I ultimately think they should dictate a single word of what I write? No. I am the only one who should be in control of that."

This is a pretty important statement for me as a Potter fan. It tells me that Rowling committed herself, early on, to remaining true to her own plans for the Harry Potter books and to avoid being influenced, dictated to even, by outside forces, be they her readers, her editors or even the films made of her books.

Two other highlights from this BBC interview, filmed between the publication of the fourth and fifth books:

1. Jo Rowling makes it clear that the film version of her books were, at least to that point, entirely outside her control. No matter how carefully she kept control over the writing of the books to herself, she was clearly willing to turn over complete control over the film versions to others.

She says, "The closer the viewing [of the film version of The Philosopher's Stone, the first novel] came, the more frightened I became, to the point where, where I actually sat down to watch the film, I was terrified because I thought 'oh, please don't do anything that's not in the book; please don't take horrible liberties with the plot'."

She concludes by saying of the first film: "I liked it, which was a relief, as you can imagine."

This may just mean that I can absolve Jo Rowling of any blame for the ridiculous liberties the film makers took with the plots of the later books, the devastation they wrought on The Half-Blood Prince and The Deathly Hallows especially. I can't imagine Rowling emerging from any of the last three films thinking that they had stayed true to her original books.

2. By that point at least, Rowling had written the Epilogue for Book Seven. She actually holds up the file folder for the camera, calls it the Epilogue and says, "In the Epilogue, I basically say what happens to everyone after they leave the school, those who survive."

That doesn't prove conclusively that she had the final plot completely figured out but it does indicate quite clearly that she spent a lot of time early on planning out where the novels would go.