J.K. Rowling Says “Directors Cut” and “Maybe” In a Sentence With Harry Potter; Everybody Flip Out, I Guess?

J.K. Rowling has a new book coming out soon, her first book that isn’t a Harry Potter book and so necessarily her first book since finishing the Harry Potter series. So it’s not surprising that there are a lot of interviews out there and that there are a lot of good quotes from her about writing, writing her first book that isn’t in a fantasy setting, how fame has changed her writing process, and how she feels about her bestselling wizard boarding school series just over five years from the release of its conclusion.

Turns out, like pretty much any author, she’s not 100% happy with how all the books turned out. She feels like two of them, in particular, could have used some extra editing. And when she reads them, she assuages those feelings by imagining the “directors cut” version of them. Aaaand that’s it (despite what a lot of articles out there would like it to be).

Rowling told BBC News:

There were a couple of the Potters and I definitely knew that they needed another year. I had to write on the run and there were times when it was really tough. And I read them, and I think ‘Oh God, maybe I’ll go back and do a director’s cut’, I don’t know. But you know what, I’m proud I was writing under the conditions under which I was writing, no one will ever know how tough it was at times.

One of those books is likely Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire, which, if I’m remembering correctly, she’s said that she regrets handing off to publishers without giving one more editing pass. And if you asked me which book I think could stand for the most improvement, it’d probably be the very next one Order of the Phoenix, but Rowling probably shouldn’t base her actions off of which HP books I find to be insufferably frustrating and boring. All in all, it’s kind of too bad that she felt so much pressure from fans and the publishing community that she didn’t take the time to make her books as good as she thought they could be when she was writing them.

So, to reiterate: what we’ve got here is an off the cuff remark jokingly made about the common regrets of writers everywhere. It’s not a promise of J.K. Rowling pulling a George Lucas on a couple Harry Potter jokes. But it might just be an argument for why our needling of George R.R. Martin about finishing Game of Thrones should stay firmly in the realm of jokes rather than seriousness.

…says this person who doesn’t read Game of Thrones anyway…

(via Digital Spy.)