The following podcast contains audio extracted from videos on the Harry Potter Theory YouTube channel.

Hey everyone, welcome to another installment of Harry Potter Theory.

Today we're discussing ghost plots.

You might not be too surprised to hear that Rowling, who wrote the seven Harry Potter books

in a 10-year time span, generated a fair bit of information, storylines, plots, characters

that simply never made it into 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 17 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 developed. I also found myself developing storylines

for secondary or even tertiary characters that were superfluous to requirements.

More of a wrench with 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 detailed plot lines and characters

have since been exposed by rolling.

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.

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