13 LIVING IN THE WORLD OF HARRY POTTER

J.K. Rowling (Author): I know that when I read books as a kid, the characters became part of my fantasy life.

Margot Adler (Interviewer): Uh-huh. And you've lived with Harry 1 Potter for more than ten years.

Rowling: Yeah.

Margot: And I’m wondering if he lives with you now, more with you now? Does he sit on your shoulder? You know that.

Rowling: He’s still very with me.

Margot: Always?

Rowling: Of course. I mean it's avery very all-consuming project. It's a seven novel series. I have 127 characters. That's a lot of characters to keep in play. It's an increasingly complex plot, as I always planned it. Obviously it's the focus of an enormous amount of my time and energy and that huge part of my life.

Margot: Now you still have at least three years to go to write five, six and seven of the series. And given that Harry Potter was ten years in the making, are there other projects that are beginning to 1)percolate 2? I'm not saying you have to tell us those but that are beginning to sort of percolate in your head for sort of beyond Harry?

Rowling: There are ideas. But as I say, it's 127 characters in this, it’s very long. I'm not eager to finish Harry. I don't want to lose the momentum 3, so I'm not about to take time off from writing it in the sense that I don't want to walk away from it and come back. It's going to be part of the reason to finish the book. It'sbeen such a huge part of my life and I neither want to hasten towards it nor do I want to extend the series unnecessarily. And I still love the writing of it, but it was very pressured at one point and I was really 2)pressurized putting on myself. Obviously I wanted to finish the book to my satisfaction and I obviously didn't want to disappoint people by missing the deadline. We made the deadline but I did do that by putting in very, very long days and working in a, far more pressured way than I normally work.

Margot: How are you protecting yourself from all this celebrity 4 in order to have time to write?

Rowling: Mostly it’s really not that difficult, you know. People ask me, “Can you still walk down the street without being recognized very easily?” The more difficult aspect is that you do find everyone wants something, and loads of the people who want something. “I want it for very, very good causes.” But there has to be a counterpoint because I will not produce anymore work if I do everything that people are asking of me. So there are charities I do work for but obviously I have to turn a lot of it down. It's quite apart from wanting to continue to be a novelist. It's wonderful I lovegiving readings, I love answering kids’ questions. In fact this is very difficult, but journalists have been asking me for the title of book five, and I finally this morning I cracked and told an eight-year- old boy because I just wanted to see the look on his face when I told him. But only occasionally do I think, “What have you done?” and normally that’s on a day when some journalist has come up and bangs on my front door and I never expected that and I can't say I particularly enjoy that. But most of the time it is really wonderful.

Margot: Knowing what do you know now about the last four years of experience? Is there anything that you’d do differently?

Rowling: In retrospect 5...only fairly 3)trivial things. Overall no, not really. In terms of the writing, you always look back at your work at your books and think, “Why did I say it that way? Why did I do it that way?” I think the urged thinker remains 6 even after the books are in print. In other ways in sort of handling everything that's happened, I'm still learning on the job.

                     生活在哈利波特的世界里

J·K·罗琳(作者)：我知道我小时侯读书时，故事里的这些小主人公们就成了我的幻想的一部分。

玛戈特·阿德勒(记者)：口恩。你和哈利·波特一起已经走了十多年。

罗琳：是的。

玛戈特：我想知道他现在还和你在一起吗？是否还会继续和你生活下去？他是否还坐在你的肩头？你明白我的意思吧。

罗琳：他的确还和我在一起。

玛戈特：永远？

罗琳：当然。我想说，这是一个需要全身心投入的工作。这是一个包括七本小说的系列故事。我有127个人物角色。有这么多角色是相当多了。而且情节也像我一直计划的那样将变得越来越复杂。我大量的时间与精力很明显都花在这上头，那是我生活中的极大部分。

玛戈特：现在你还有至少三年的时间来写完系列故事的第五、六、七部。你用了十年的时间来写《哈利·波特》，同时是不是也在写其他故事？你不用详细告诉我们那些故事，但除了《哈利》外你是否还构思着其他故事？

罗琳：是有。但正如我刚才所说的，这个故事里有127个角色，非常长。我并不急着写完《哈利》。我不想失去动力，所以我并不想耗费时间去做其他事，也就是说，我不想搁下它然后又重新开始写。这是我要写完这部小说的部分原因。它是我生命中如此重要的一部分，因此我既不想草草了结它，也不想做不必要的拖延。我仍然十分喜爱写这个故事，但有时压力很大，我也在给自己施压。我当然想写完这本书后让自己觉得满意，但我当然也不想错过最后期限以使读者感到失望。我们定好了最后期限，但我总是花很多很多时间来写，压力非常大，比我正常工作的压力大得多。

玛戈特：盛名之下你怎样争取时间写作？

罗琳∶实际上没那么难，你知道。人们问我，“你还能上街而轻易做到不给人认出来吗？”最困难的是你发现每个人的想法都不一样，而且他们都有很好的借口。我有一个对付的办法，因为如果我满足每个人的要求，那我就肯定一事无成。我为数家慈善机构捐助，而其余的我一概回绝。这与成为一名小说家是不同的。这是很有趣的，我喜欢写故事，喜欢回答孩子们的问题。实际上，这很难，因为不断有记者问我第五部书的书名，今天早上我终于说了出来，我告诉了一个八岁的小男孩，我想看看他听到后的表情。但有时我也会想，“你做了些什么？”那是一天几名记者来到我家“砰砰”地敲着我家的前门，我从没想到会发生这种事，我也很不欣赏这种做法。不过大部分时间还是妙不可言的。

玛戈特∶你对这四年的经历有什么体会吗？你有什么不同的打算吗？

罗林∶回想起来……只有一些非常细小的事情。整体来说没有，真的没有。就写作来说，我会总是回头看看我的书，想，“为什么我会这样写？为什么我会这样做？”我想甚至在书印出来后这些问题也没停止过。其他的就是把一切发生的事情安排好，我还在从这项工作中学习。

1) percolate   v. 精力充沛，变得积极；滤过

2) pressurize   v. 密封，加压