{"id":2527,"date":"2022-02-04T12:00:00","date_gmt":"2022-02-04T12:00:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/livingwriter.com\/blog\/?p=2527"},"modified":"2022-02-03T15:02:36","modified_gmt":"2022-02-03T15:02:36","slug":"plotting-like-j-k-rowling-with-livingwriter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/livingwriter.com\/blog\/plotting-like-j-k-rowling-with-livingwriter\/","title":{"rendered":"Plotting Like J.K. Rowling with LivingWriter"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

The Harry Potter<\/em> novel series is a well-celebrated series of books about the eponymous boy, Harry Potter, and his rise to power in order to defeat the strongest Dark wizard of his time, Voldemort. J.K. Rowling managed to enrapture the whole world with her own world of magic and wizards and witches, not an easy feat to do for an author. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Harry Potter<\/em> is one of the most famous franchises in the world.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

Hence, it would be no surprise that many writers would love to follow and know how Rowling wrote a milestone piece of literature composed of complex themes that would be enjoyed by generations of readers. Thankfully, plotting like J.K. Rowling is actually pretty straightforward once you get the hang of it.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

J.K. Rowling as an Architect<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

Building a large, complex world like that of Harry Potter<\/em>\u2019s is obviously not something that one would just randomly think of from a single thought. Rather, it is a result of a lot of time spent on meticulously planning and deliberately thinking over each piece of the world. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Architects plan out most, if not everything, about their story beforehand.<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

This makes J.K Rowling a story architect. As a quick introduction, architects<\/a> are the kind of writers who plan and outline their novel before starting their first drafts. Rowling admits to finding more success in writing by the way of the outline, as we can see with her repertoire of Harry Potter\u2019s stories.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

J.K Rowling carefully plans her stories beforehand. She extensively utilizes outlines and notes to work out multiple plotlines and important points in the story. A famous example of her outline can be seen below, which is a snippet of her outline for the fifth installment of the Harry Potter<\/em> series, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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J.K. Rowling’s handwritten outline of the Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix<\/em><\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n\n

A Breakdown of the Outline<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The image above is a single page from J.K. Rowling\u2019s map of chapters 13-24 of the book Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix<\/em>. Admittedly, Rowling\u2019s outline is a bit messier than expected, but there are a lot of important details we can glean from this document about her plotting style.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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A good story often has multiple subplots branching out from the main plot.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Let\u2019s start by recognizing that she used a makeshift spreadsheet on a single leaf of paper to plan out the overarching storyline of the novel. Commonly, outlining is often done through bulleted lists and points. This style of outlining can be quite limiting, especially for larger pieces like novels, as this only allows you for a rather linear plot.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The spreadsheet allows Rowling to keep track of the major plot and the various subplots that occur together in a chapter. You can see that for this outline, Rowling had 6 plots: <\/p>\n\n\n\n