The Radio Times
Interview at 9 AM GMT on December 10th on BBC Radio 4
The Radio Times magazine has published some excerpts from the recently conducted interview with JK Rowling and Stephen Fry.
SF: Is it really true that you’ve got it [the end of the story] all planned out?
JKR: Yes, I do know what’s going to happen in the end. And occasionally I get cold shivers when someone guesses at something that’s very close, and then I panic and I think “Oh, is it very obvious?” and then someone says something that’s so off the wall that I think “No, it’s clearly not that obvious!”
So much that happens in [book] six relates to what happens in [book] seven. In six, although there is an ending that could be seen as definitive in one sense, you very strongly feel the plot is not over this time and it will continue. It’s an odd feeling, for the first time I’m very aware that I’m finishing.
SF: You’ve not held back from the difficult and the frightening [in your fiction].
JKR: I feel very strongly that there is a move to sanitise literature because we’re trying to protect children not from, necessarily, the grisly facts of life but from their own imaginations… And the child that has been protected from Dementors in fiction, I would argue, is much more likely to fall prey to them later in life in reality.
SF: Do you imagine you’ll write for children the next time you write something new?
JKR: Truthfully, I don’t know. There is another children’s book that’s sort of mouldering in a cupboard that I quite like which is for slightly younger children I would say. But there are other things I’d like to write, too. But I think I’ll need to find a good pseudonym and do it all secretly because I’m very frightened of the unbearable hype that would attend a post-Harry Potter book. I’m not sure I look forward to that at all.