10 objects on which J.K. Rowling maybe wrote Harry Potter

Consider: her arms.

I was one of those kids who never believed in writing notes on paper. I wrote phone numbers on my hands, reminders on my arms. Occasionally, I wrote song lyrics and pretended they were tattoos. Hasn’t everyone done this at some point? Hasn’t J.K. Rowling?

It seems remiss not to consider the possibility that Rowling could have drafted Harry Potter on her arms. Or her hands. Or both. Once she ran out of napkins on the train, she could have turned to her own skin. The spell Ron used to try turning Scabbers yellow would have fit on her forearm. Hermione’s introduction to the boys could have curved over the inside of her wrist.

Later, after Rowling had washed her hands and done her errands, or gone to work, or cooked dinner, she would have had to sit down and transcribe the notes from her arms. Some of them probably blurred. She may have rewritten some dialogue. Realistically, whole scenes could have changed from when she wrote them all over herself to when she transferred them to actual paper.

Rowling used a typewriter to finalize Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, so notes on her arms would have been perfect. Kids at my school got in trouble all the time for writing the answers to tests under their sleeves. The visibility and ease with which Rowling could have rehashed what she already wrote probably made typing it up that much easier.