The short answer is both, but the order matters. Rowling has confirmed that the real creative work happens with a pen in her hand, and the keyboard comes later, once the messy part is done.
Her Own Confirmation
When a reader asked her directly on Twitter in 2017 whether she still wrote longhand, Rowling answered plainly. The pen does the heavy lifting at the stages where the story is still being figured out, which is most of the creative work.
Yes, I do write by hand a lot, especially first drafts and plotting.
J.K. Rowling, on Twitter, 2017
Note the two words she singles out: drafts and plotting. Those are the parts where you're still deciding what happens and how it sounds. The keyboard comes in once those decisions are mostly made.
Longhand From the Start
This isn't a recent affectation. Back in the Edinburgh cafe years she drafted the first Harry Potter book in laborious longhand, then typed it up herself once a grant let her buy a word processor. There's a practical logic to it. Writing by hand is slower, and that slowness forces you to weigh each sentence before it lands, rather than spraying words at a screen and sorting them out later.
The surviving handwritten pages back this up. An early draft of a Philosopher's Stone chapter, written in biro on plain unlined paper, shows just how much of the foundation was laid by hand, crossings-out and all. The book the world knows started as ink on cheap paper at a cafe table.
Where the Keyboard Comes In
Typing isn't an afterthought, it's a stage. Transferring a longhand draft to the screen becomes its own editing pass, where she can revise, cut, and tighten as she goes. Nothing makes it onto the page twice without being reconsidered once, which means the typing-up doubles as a free second draft.
By the later books she'd moved to a laptop, working in Word, but the pattern held: think it through on paper, then commit and refine on the machine. The tools changed with her circumstances. The instinct to figure things out by hand first did not.
Her famous hand-drawn plot grid for Order of the Phoenix is the clearest proof that her planning lives on paper rather than in software, a whole system of chapters, subplots, and offstage threads built with a ruler and a pen before the typing began. See exactly how the grid works for the full breakdown.
See how it fits together in the full J.K. Rowling writing routine.
What You Can Steal
- Draft the hard parts by hand. Writing longhand slows you down enough to actually think.
- Plot on paper. Her grids and outlines were sketched by hand, not built in an app.
- Make typing an edit. Treat transcribing your draft as a built-in revision pass.
- Use the tool that fits the stage. Pen for thinking, keyboard for committing.