Live With It and Move On.

There will be deluge of pro and con comments regarding an upcoming story in the entertainment magazine, Wonderland. J.K. Rowling is having second thoughts about how she constructed the Harry Potter series. Primarily, she is "sorry" for hooking up Ron with Hermione. Harry should have ended up with her instead.

This is a failing that can haunt writers with too much time on their hands. Once a story is published, that's it. Everything is set in stone. Live with it and move on.

As I read and watched the Potter stories unfold, at first I imagined Harry and Hermione would become a couple, but that's not reality, is it? Ron's red-haired sister comes on the scene and something inside each signals a relationship made in Heaven. If you want to write characters who live in Never, Neverland, write it that way. If you want your story and characters to sound, feel, and act in a realistic way in which readers can relate, then do it, but in the end, have no regrets. Once in print, you can't re-write it. Just write differently the next time.

A lot of time has been spent in previous eFiles discussing players, and loading them up with character and quirks, essentially making them sound, feel, and act real. Love is one of those elements that introduces the unexpected.

To become a bit personal, I dated several girls over the course of my younger years, but there was never any special feeling or attraction. We were just friends. And then, I was dating a young woman and actually entertaining the idea of moving toward a proposal of marriage when this other young woman came into the picture. Bong! A year later we were married and have been happily married for thirty-four years. That's the way it happens sometimes and that's what I saw happen in Harry Potter. We invariably write about things we know and relationships that did and did not work. So, my theory is -- go with the flow and stop trying to twist it into shapes that break instead of bend, and once done realize it is done.

Back onto the main track, in the scope of things, we have addressed the issue of "minor" players in our writing in earlier eFiles, folks other than the protagonist and antagonist--specifically six other players. Their primary purpose is to show the hero and/or villain from different points of view. Using the Phillips/Huntley and Schechter models as pertains to the hero and villain, these would be:

1.  Protector, keeper of the moral compass;
2.  Deflector, who tries to pull them from their moral compass;

3.  Believer, who believes, trusts, and follows them without question;
4.  Doubter, who challengers their methods;

5.  Thinker, who reflects on the course of action before taking action on their own;
6.  Feeler, who acts intuitively and questions later.

You notice, they have been grouped into pairs because they can play off one another as well as interact with the hero/villain, and in the end illuminate how the hero/villain respond.

As an experiment, use any one of the Harry Potter novels and plug into these roles the characters that full-fill the task. Harry has his troupe, and Voldemort has his.

Mrs. Rowling had no notion of this make-up, no formal instruction as to how to construct a successful story, but these players appeared nevertheless because that's just the way it's done. And then there is Ron's sister who Harry fell in love with? Like love, someone who came out of left field and surprises everyone.

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Jeffrey Schechter, My Story Can Beat Up Your Story: Ten Ways to Toughen Up Your Screenplay from Opening Hook to Knockout Punch (Kindle Edition).

Melanie Anne Phillips & Chris Huntley, Dramatica, A New Theory of Story found at  http://storymind.com/dramatica/