Keep Writing

When you name the only Asian character in the book "Cho Chang" and the only black person "Shacklebolt", the writing itself really isn't good.

Rowling is a bigot and her work is as derivative as it gets. But she did work hard writing, and she was extremely lucky that her books became so popular. Thousands of excellent books are published every year that are just as good or better and they don't catch on the way the HP series did.

All of those things can be true at the same time, and it's not crab mentality to point them out.

The lessons to be learned here are this:

Keep writing. Until your ideas are on paper, they are just ideas.

Don't be discouraged by a lack of success. If your writing doesn't sell, doesn't immediately capture hearts or resonate with the masses, this doesn't mean it isn't good or worthwhile. Write for yourself. This was the point that JK was trying to make, I think.

Success requires help. Nobody does it alone. JK would absolutely be nobody without editors and publishers and marketing helping her books reach an audience. Find people that share your vision and support your dreams. Aspiration is good, and expectation is counterproductive.

Be excellent to each other. Rowling is a bigot, and that's part of her legacy. But she's just an author. She's not an authority, she's not a leader, and she's not a role model. Don't be a bigot. It will improve your writing, but that's a tangential benefit of being a good person.

There's understandably a pretty big hate boner for Rowling on federated sites. The initial controversy she got into was saying that using the term "people who menstruate" as a general term instead of women was a partial erasure of women and their struggles and identity, and that there's nothing wrong with using women instead. To be fair it was in reply to an article on menstrual health. I think it's not great but it's an averagely not great comment and the lgbt+ community has a tendency to overreact and go from 0-100 (My opinion, not everyone's). Here's the initial comment which blew up, make your own opinion, do more research into what has actually been said. I just want people to be informed in whatever position they hold.

https://twitter.com/jk_rowling/status/1269382518362509313

I think her prose is dry as shit but her world building and sense of what her audience wanted and desired at that point in history and culture were fantastic. I'm of the belief that there's nothing wrong with separating art from the artist

If you haven’t read them yourself then you don’t understand how truly horrible her writing is. Her prose is wooden, her dialogue is forced, and she named a Chinese character “Cho Chang” with a straight face. There are plot holes so big that she has to continually go back and retcon random bullshit, like the literal plumbing at Hogwarts. The big scary spell is “abracadabra” with one letter changed.

She’s a hack.