The HARDEST Chapter Jk Rowling Ever Wrote (Goblet of Fire) - Harry Potter Explained

Hey everyone,

Welcome to another installment of Harry Potter Theory. In this video, we’re going to be discussing JK Rowling, The Goblet of Fire, and the chapter that took her 13 attempts.

I am of course talking about chapter 9 -‘The Dark Mark’. Given that JK Rowling had written several books up to this point, it’s unusual that she would suddenly just get-stuck. It has been reported that this chapter alone took Rowling 13 tries, which is honestly just adding insult to injury given that she already had to rewrite a good portion of the Goblet of Fire to remove a character, among other things. (If you want to know more about that, check out my video titled Jk Rowling's Huge FLAW with Goblet of Fire).

13 times- can you imagine rewriting something 13 times? A whole chapter? That’s the type of thing that would make you want to throw your computer off the balcony. In an interview, Rowling even expressed that she considered just giving up at this point:

Sometimes, even at this stage, you can see trouble looming; nearly all of the six published books have had Chapters of Doom. The quintessential, never, I hope, to be beaten Chapter That Nearly Broke My Will To Go On was chapter nine, ‘Goblet of Fire’ (appropriately enough, ‘The Dark Mark’.)

She was also asked:

How many rough copies or rewrites of a chapter do you do before you get it right?

Loads and loads and loads. The worst ever was 13 different versions of one chapter. I hated that chapter so much; at one point, I thought of missing it out altogether and just putting in a page saying 'Chapter 9 was too difficult' and going straight to Chapter 10.

But, fortunately for us, by the time Rowling got to chapter 9 of book 4, she had already introduced the world to Harry Potter- by this point she had no other choice - the show would have to go on.

But the question stands: Why did this particular chapter cause Rowling so much trouble? We were already so far in to the Harry Potter series- what happened?

The reason that chapter 9 was so difficult was because it was the chapter that kicked off the plot for the Goblet of Fire - this was the chapter that could make or break the interest of the reader, and there was A LOT going on.

It was in this chapter that Barty Crouch jr breaks loose and begins to work on his masters return from the shadows. He escapes, steals Harry's wand, and then fires the Dark Mark in to the sky- calling the death eaters. But all of this had to be done without giving away too many clues to an attentive reader.

JK Rowling later discusses the chapter with screenwriter Steve Kloves who worked on the Goblet of Fire:

That story I must have spent three or four months trying to make dramatically comprehensible on screen -

I am so sorry -

...and every time I did it, y'know, everyone, y'know -

“I am so sorry, Steve, because I've handed you a problem that had tortured me...because the scene in the Quidditch World Cup where you first see but don't see Barty Crouch, and you don't know what's going on, and the Dark Mark appears for the first time and it's incredibly obscure in every sense, what's going on there and trying to make that appear in any way... coherent (laughs) to the reader while obscuring as much as I wanted to obscure...was terrible. I had about thirteen drafts about that chapter.”

And that’s it for this video! I hope you enjoyed it. Leave a comment down below with your favourite of the Harry Potter books.


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