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

LONDON, ENGLAND – FEBRUARY 12: J.K. Rowling attends the 70th EE British Academy Film Awards (BAFTA) at Royal Albert Hall on February 12, 2017 in London, England. (Photo by John Phillips/Getty Images)

Consider: tea leaves.

Sybill Trelawney teaches her students on the first day of Divination how to read each other’s fortunes in tea leaves. In Harry’s cup is the shape of a black dog. Professor Trelawney dramatically declares the shape to be the grimm before sobbing over her prediction that Harry will die that year. It’s a dramatic scene that sets the tone for future interactions with Trelawney.

Perhaps J.K. Rowling’s inspiration for Harry Potter came to her in tea leaves. Although there’s much disdain toward Divination in the Harry Potter books, it’s possible that Rowling doesn’t hold that disdain at all. Perhaps she’s just trying to throw us off the scent.

According to her author biography on Bloomsbury’s website, Rowling amassed tons of notes as she wrote. They were mostly on scraps of paper, but writing a book is exhausting. Tea has a lot of caffeine and definitely works to keep you awake and focused. Therefore, it makes total sense that at least some of Rowling’s Potter thoughts must have been written in tea leaves.

Perhaps that’s cheating. If divine intervention showed Rowling ideas for her world-famous book series, technically it wasn’t an object on which she could have written Harry Potter. But maybe she rearranged the leaves to form the shapes the students describe in that one Divination class. Maybe she used them to figure out the exact shape of Harry’s lightning bolt scar. We just don’t know. Unfortunately, I don’t think we ever will.