Simplified Summer Series–What If?
Last day of July! Summer is almost over. I can’t believe it. At any rate, this is a fifth week, and so it’s supposed to be something just kind of random and fun. Hopefully, this is just that. We’re going to try a little game of what if.
So, here’s the idea of how this works. You pick your favorite book, then you find a point where a character makes a decision that could impact the entire rest of the book. It might not even be the main character. Sometimes, a side character’s decisions make as much difference. This is something that fascinates me. Maybe I’ll do a bigger post about it later. But for now, we’re just turning it into a game. So, after you have picked your spot, you go over what would have happened if the character had made a different choice than they did.
Here’s an example. Let’s use Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, just because there’s a good chance people have read it. If you haven’t, be warned, there are spoilers ahead. So, here’s your “what if.” What if Hagrid hadn’t gotten the dragon egg? Here’s what might have happened instead. For one, Harry, Ron, and Hermione wouldn’t have gotten in trouble when they helped Hagrid get rid of the egg, and they wouldn’t have ended up in the forbidden forest. That would have left out a fairly important clue, but it might not have changed the story too much by itself. But there’s a good chance if Hagrid hadn’t gotten the egg, he wouldn’t have told the “stranger” how to deal with Fluffy, and as a result, he wouldn’t have accidentally told Harry and his friends how to get past Fluffy. So, in the end, nobody would have been able to get past Fluffy, and the sorcerer’s stone might have remained safe forever. Or they might have found another way, who knows? The thing with this game is it just opens up possibilities about where things could go differently. Sometimes the ending won’t change much, the characters will just use a different path to get there, but sometimes it can change drastically. Anyhow, now it’s your turn.
What story will you use? What character will change their decision, and what decision do they change? How does it change the story?