If there’s one author who has more urban myths than you can shake a stick at, it’s Harry Potter creator J.K. Rowling. When her rags-to-riches story first hit the public, it was full of more than a handful “embellished” tales.
There were tales of her living in a flat with no heater, and tales of her writing on napkins at a diner because she couldn’t afford paper. Both of those have been debunked by Rowling herself, but that’s not to say she doesn’t have her fair share of weird true stories.
It turns out she wrote down the names of the Hogwarts houses on an unexpected scrap of paper, as she revealed on Twitter.
“The best thing I ever wrote on was an aeroplane sick bag. Came up with the Hogwarts houses on it.”
This is especially surprising given how annoyed she got when a journalist wrote that she wrote the entire first novel on napkins. In her mind, it painted her in a much worse situation than she was in as a struggling writer. Though as hard as it got, she was adamant that she could afford pens and paper.
That being said, the idea of her writing on an airplane doggie bag certainly seems to be one out of desperation — though a different kind of desperation. In a moment of inspiration, it’s easy to be without a scrap of paper to write things down on, and in this instance, a sick bag was likely all that was nearby.
Well done on her for being resourceful. Who knows if the names would have been the same if she’d forgotten.
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SOURCE: JK Rowling