This interview/conversation between Daniel Radcliffe (Harry Potter in the movies) and Jo ("J.K.") Rowling (author of the Harry Potter books), was shot near the end of the filming of the last Harry Potter movie, Deathly Hallows, part 2. That came out in 2011, so this interview/conversation probably took place in 2010.
While I'm a writer, I'm primarily an 1980' zine publisher turned prolific blogger, who has written for a few magazines in the 80's and 90's. I've never written much fiction, and never had any published. But 2,400+ blog posts into my writing life, I've simply done a lot of one form of writing. Most of the time I was focused on the weird little BMX bike world that was my life for 20 years. But over the last 2-3 years, I've been watching videos of other writers more, just learning more about the various aspects of writing itself, and particularly how novelists think, an go about their work.
I'm not a huge Harry Potter fan, by Potter standards. I read the first book a couple of years ago, and I loved the series of movies. For some reason though, Jo Rowling, aka "J.K." is one of the novelists I most like to listen to about writing itself. Her story is fascinating, that's one part of it. But more than anything, she just talks real openly about the writing process in interviews. Her thoughts on creating the amazing Harry Potter/Hogwarts world, the logic of the books, and on the various characters, are things I love to watch.
One thing about this conversation/interview, is how both Jo and Daniel talk about how real the characters become to them, as a writer and as an actor. Many years ago, I read a really obscure book about a Tibetan mystic concept called tulpas. Supposedly Tibetan mystics, for some reason, would visualize characters that would ultimately become real people, or semi-real, anyhow. I'm not buying that. But the book I read was really interesting, and the writer compared the Tibetan tulpas to Superman, and other comic heroes that were ingrained in the public consciousness.
When I read that book, one of the Star Wars movies had just come out, and I thought about how "real" Yoda, for example had become to millions of people. While Yoda is a 2 1/2 foot tall muppet with great wisdom written by George Lucas, and who "acts" thanks to amazing special effects, the result is a character that feels nearly real to a lot of people. I remember being out riding bikes with years ago, and we'd yell Yoda quotes to a friend, "Do or do not, there is no try." Yoda's sayings, as a character, were as real to us as something a real person might have said.
The way Daniel and Jo talk about the characters reminds me of that tulpa idea. A writer thinks up these completely fictional characters, and they take on a life of their own, in a sense. When a writer works with these characters for months or years, they begin to feel pretty real. The fictional characters are nearly as close as real people, to the writer, as she's writing them. If the novel gets really popular, like the Harry Potter books have, those characters live in many people's minds, they take on a type of realness, to large numbers of people, and ultimately influence society in some sense. There can be a type of reality to purely fictional characters, like the Tibetan tulpas.
All Tibetan talk aside, this is a great conversation between two people, talking about a series of stories, that most of us know fairly well. It's a great watch/listen as a writer.
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