Depression hit Rowling when her first marriage to a television journalist broke down after just two years.

She had moved to Portugal to teach English and gave birth to her first daughter Jessica.

She said: “I’d had a short and quite catastrophic marriage. I had to get my baby back to Britain and re-build us a life and adrenaline kept me going.

“It was only when I came to rest it hit me what a complete mess I had made of my life. That hit me quite hard. We were as skint as you can be without being homeless and at that point I was definitely clinically depressed.

“That was characterized by a numbness, a coldness and an inability to believe you will feel happy again. All the color drained out of life.”

Afraid for her daughter

Rowling hit an all-time low when she convinced herself something awful was destined to happen to her two-year-old daughter. She said: “I loved Jessica very very much and was terrified something was going to happen to her.

“I’d gone into that very depressive mind set where everything has gone wrong so this one good thing in my life will now go wrong as well.

“It was almost a surprise to me every morning that she was still alive. I kept expecting her to die. It was a bad bad time.”

Revisiting the scene film crews took Rowling back to the flat a few miles from Edinburgh where she overcame depression by writing first novel Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone.

Where the healing began

Tears began to flow as she walked into the small lounge room where she first put pen to paper.

She said: “This is really where I turned my life around completely. My life changed so much in this flat. I feel I really became myself here. Everything was stripped away. I’d made such a mess of things.

“I just thought I want to write so I wrote the book. What was the worst that could happen? It could get turned down by every publisher in Britain. Big deal.”

From article: J.K. Rowling, Harry Potter and Depression.

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J.K. Rowling and depression, depression and writing, depression relief products, depression books

Actor David Thewlis‘ films include Naked (1993), the Harry Potter series, and many more. His first novel, The Late Hector Kipling, has just been published, and screenwriter William Monahan interviewed Thewlis for a BlackBook magazine article [Fiction (With a Twist of Lennon)].

William Monahan: I find that when you’re writing a character, you are that character. It’s probably no joke that Shakespeare was an actor. Dickens, famously, was a brilliant performer of his invented people, not only when he was reading in public but also when he was creating them on the page. Do you see any connection yourself between the ability to act and the ability to write?

David Thewlis: I think there is a very strong connection. One of the most pointless questions I seem to get asked over and over is, “Do you think you may now give up acting?” as though I am condemned to choose one or the other.

Character development on screen and page

As an actor you spend your life creating characters, understanding motives, paying great attention to the details, the mannerisms, the speech inflections.

It does not seem much of a jump then to shift this ability to the page. I work with dialogue all the time and endlessly persevere to make speech sound natural.

Actors read a lot—scripts, source novels, research; they live with words, so it seems a natural progression to try and write a few yourself, since over the years you have learned what works.

Also, in my own case, I was actually writing a long time before I even thought of acting. It has just taken me rather a long time to find my own style and also to build up the confidence to put something out there.

The Late Hector Kipling

William Monahan calls The Late Hector Kipling “a hyper-literate, shockingly funny, and just plain shocking look at vanity, revenge, sex, suicide, death, madness, and murder in the London art world.”

David Thewlis describes some of the themes that can relate to many artists, “There are parallels to the film world here, of course. The money is similar at that level of success, the bitterness, the rivalry, the celebrity, and, of course, the twisted fans.

“The money and the fame can drive wedges into relationships, with the ones who get left behind wondering if their rival is merely lucky or if it is in some way a reflection of their own lack of talent. Many friendships cannot bear the weight of this ambiguity, and they begin to suffer a loss of spontaneity and generosity of spirit.

“I also found the art world full of amorality. The players are fantastically eccentric. They seem to crawl around in some shady hinterland between home decorating and pornography, and one always imagines that they must smell a bit funny.”

Writing in angst

Another interview article (UK Vogue, Sept 2007), described his writing process. Thewlis said, “I rented a flat in Soho and cut the plug off the television.” By day, he walked the streets and sat in cafes, watching and plotting. By night, he wrote. Within nine months, he had written his first draft. His publishers loved it, but said it needed some work. By then, Thewlis was in love with Friel and his life in general.

“I used to write out of angst,” he explains. “When I met Anna, I lost that urge to vent spleen.” [His partner, actor Anna Friel, stars in the new TV series "Pushing Daisies."]
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Also see a related post on “angst”: Keeping the turmoil in your art – not your spirit, and The Inner Actor post: Actors Privacy – The Dark Side of Fame.
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David Thewlis, multiple talents, writers inner life, books by actors

“White Oleander, for example, was so much about loneliness, and I was revealing something about myself. You have to work as deeply as you can to give the reader something worth reading, but you’re also showing things about yourself that you’re not pleased with.

“It’s your flaws, not your strengths that go down in the depths of your books. You’re exposed, like dreaming you’re naked in a public building.

[HAVE YOU BEEN TO THE DARK PLACES YOUR CHARACTERS HAVE BEEN?]

“I’ve been depressed many times in my life. But under it all I’m an optimist. I’ve never been in that extreme a state, like my suicidal character Michael Faraday in Paint it Black. I have to tell myself, Life can be good, and I can get through this. This will pass.”

Janet Fitch – from interview by Mary Curran-Hackett, Writer’s Digest

Related Talent Development Resources pages:
article: Creativity and Depression, by Douglas Eby
Depression and Creativity section
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Janet Fitch, writing process, writers inner life, writing and depression

“Beyond the reality of his stark cell and the violent perversion of the other inmates lies his imagination, which he turns to his past, to an ‘accident’ with a little girl named Alice, and now to the erotic life of a nineteen-year-old suburban co-ed who draws him into a flirtatious epistolary exchange.” [Summary from her site amhomesbooks.com]

A.M. Homes admits in an interview that “Alice” is “a profoundly disturbing book. It’s a serious book, an upsetting book… Writing fiction, to me, means being inside other people’s heads. But this head was so completely unfamiliar and dark…

“It was really, really hard. I remember feeling awful by the end of it. I was depressed and sad. I went into a bookstore to do some research, looking up stabbings and forensic reports, the details of these sorts of things, and I remember standing in the bookstore, literally crying.”

She adds, “I once jokingly told someone that every book is like a relationship. They’re four or five years long – that’s not so bad. They’re serious. They demand a lot of attention. But I remember thinking that I wanted to have one with someone who’s not so crazy and peculiar and demanding.” [From A. M. Homes Is a Big Fat Liar, by Dave Weich, Powells.com]

In an Elle magazine interview [Crimes of the Heart, by Randall Kenan], she responded to a question about people describing the novel as shocking: “It scared me sometimes when I was writing it; at times I had to stop—I frightened myself. I don’t know that shock’s such a bad thing… but I thought intellectually and artistically that this was the most ambitious book I’d tried.”

Her new book is The Mistress’s Daughter: A Memoir

[Photo of Homes by Marion Ettlinger.]

Some actors also talk about being deeply and intimately engaged with a character, and how that can be dangerous for their mental health and equilibrium.

Nicole Kidman, for example, once commented, “Unfortunately the thing that makes me want to be an actor, in terms of wanting to be consumed, is also what can destroy you because it becomes almost too hard.”

Related Talent Development Resources pages:
Emotion resources   articles exercises sites books
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nurturing mental health: writing 2: quotes articles books
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A.M. Homes, writing and depression, challenges for writers, writing dark subjects