JK Rowling sat down with Charlie Rose for an hour long chat which will air this Friday evening on PBS in the United States, where the author will discuss her works, like The Casual Vacancy and of course the Harry Potter series. The special will air at 11:00pm EST in New York, 11:30pm PST in Los Angeles on October 19; for other locations, please check local listings.

Charlie Rose: How much trepidation did you have after you decided to put Harry to bed in deciding what you wanted to do – and how to do what you inevitably wanted to do – is write another book?
J.K. Rowling: I had the idea for The Casual Vacancy right after finishing Deathly Hallows. I was actually promoting Deathly Hallows in the states and I had the idea in the states while on a plane.

CR: On a plane is crucial.
JKR: On a plane is crucial because, clearly, one’s on a train, one’s on a plane. So you need to keep me moving and then I get my ideas.

There’s always trepidation. I think that people might be surprised to know that I felt trepidation every time I produced a Potter book. The weight of expectation there was … I won’t say crushing. It was extraordinary and wonderful to have that weight of expectation, but at times …

CR: You were competing with yourself.
JKR: Yeah, and with the expectations laterally of millions of fans, all of whom were very invested in the story and wanted to see what they wanted to see. I knew where I was going. I had to put on mental blinkers a lot and just think, “I know where I’m going. I must not be influenced by this.” So in a sense it was liberating to leave that weight of expectation behind and know that I could just do what I wanted to do. It was very freeing.

But I must say that I spent the first two years working on The Casual Vacancy, “You don’t even have to publish this book.” And that was a way of bringing down my own awareness that it wasn’t going to be what some people wanted it to be. Because, as we both know, I could have kept writing Harry Potters forever, pretty much.

CR: And why didn’t you?
JKR: Because I always envisaged it as a seven-book series. I had enough plot for seven books, and I always knew I would stop at seven. I’m not going to lie. It was heartbreaking, in many ways, because Harry was with me during a very turbulent period in my life. It was always a place I could go. You talk about readers always being able to go there. It was a place I was able to go and to close the door – it was like a death. But I knew that it was time to go, and I’ve not regretted it. I think it was definitely time.

CR: He meant what to you? Other than all the obvious things, wealth and all that.
JKR: Yeah, it changed my life. The most obvious thing, clearly, it utterly changed my life. It transformed my life situation. My daughter and I were in a precarious situation for a few years. But beyond that, Harry connected me to … it’s just been the through line through so much of my life. So when I look back at the books, I can remember where I was when I wrote all these seventeen years I spent with those characters. Seventeen years.

CR: But do you talk to them in some real sense?
JKR: The one that I miss the most beyond any character is Dumbledore. He was a strange character because I say I feel like I wrote him from somewhere in the back of my brain. He would often say things I didn’t know I believed. But once I saw that Dumbledore had said them, I was, “Oh yeah, that’s true.” So he was an interesting character, and I miss him. If I could talk to any of them, it would be Dumbledore.

CR: So you set out to write this new book. You knew it was going to be about adults. What else did you know when you had that inspiration on that plane?
JKR: Well, the germ of the idea was a local council election that would be diverted by teenagers, which was a device to expose certain secrets. That was the basic idea. I was excited by that idea because it was going to give me an opportunity to explore a lot of things that are important to me. Things that obsess me, frankly.

CR: Like?
JKR: Well, for example, I’ve just talked about the fact that I was in a very precarious situation for a few years. I was probably as poor as you can go without being homeless in the U.K. Which is not to say that friends and family didn’t help me, because they did. But, you know, it was tough.

CR: And you were writing a book, and had to depend on the government.
JKR: Well, yeah I did, although I was working part-time. The law, at that time, was that you could earn up to a very small amount a week without forfeiting housing benefit, which was the thing that was keeping us homed. So I worked up to that amount. I had a clerical job in a church at one point, and then I was teaching, but we were still existing partly on benefits. I couldn’t wholly support us.

Then the miracle happened. Harry was published, and we really didn’t look back after a few months. It changed my life. But that period of my life was a formative experience for me. It shaped my world view, and it always will shape my world view. The experience of having been part of a mass of people who are very voiceless, the experience of being scapegoated and stigmatized – because that was the political climate at that time – really has colored my world view ever since. I don’t think I’ll ever lose that.

Order J.K. Rowling's 512-page book The Casual Vacancy now, via:

Amazon.com - The Casual Vacancy Hardcover | The Casual Vacancy Kindle
Amazon.co.uk - The Casual Vacancy Hardcover | The Casual Vacancy Kindle
Amazon Canada - The Casual Vacancy Hardcover | The Casual Vacancy Audio CD