Welcome to Harry Potter Theory. Today we’re discussing Ghost Plots.

You might not be too surprised to hear that Rowling, who wrote the 7 Harry Potter books in a 10 year timespan, generated a fair bit of information (storylines, plots, characters) that simply never made it in to the final versions of the beloved books. And in time, these secondary pieces of information have come to be known as ‘Ghost Plots’.

“Over the seventeen years that I planned and wrote the seven Harry Potter books, I generated a mass of information about the magical world that never appeared in the books. I liked knowing these things (which was fortunate, given that I couldn’t stop my imagination spewing it all out) and often, when I needed a throwaway detail, I had it ready because of the background I had developed.

I also found myself developing storylines for secondary (or even tertiary) characters that were superfluous to requirements. More of a wrench were the plots I worked out for some much more important characters that had to be sacrificed for the bigger story. All of these I inwardly termed ‘ghost plots’, my private expression for all the untold stories that sometimes seemed quite as real to me as the ‘final cut’.”

But what you may be surprised to hear is that a lot of these deleted plotlines and characters have since been exposed by Rowling. It’s been 27 years since the first book came out, so I guess it was bound to happen eventually.

Anyway, today we’re going to be taking a closer look at some of these ghost plots, examining the Harry Potter story in a completely new light.

I’m going to cover 10 today and if you LIKE this series then I’ll keep making them. Just let me know in the comments.

Let’s dive in.
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