Eliezer and I love to talk about writing. We talk about our own current writing projects, how we’d improve the books we’re reading, and what we want to write next. Sometimes along the way I learn some amazing fact about HPMOR or Project Lawful or one of Eliezer’s other works. “Wow, you’re kidding,” I say, “do your fans know this? I think people would really be interested.”

“I can’t remember,” he usually says. “I don’t think I’ve ever explained that bit before, I’m not sure.”

I decided to interview him more formally, collect as many of those tidbits about HPMOR as I could, and share them with you. I hope you enjoy them.

It’s probably obvious, but there will be many, many spoilers for HPMOR in this article, and also very little of it will make sense if you haven’t read the book. So go read Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality before you read any further.

We talk about HPMOR’s characters, including how Eliezer tried to make every single character awesome, and why Hermione gets unicorn horn teeth. We talk about the plot, and learn some secrets about Harry’s sexuality. We talk about the setting, and Eliezer explains the Nested Nerfing Hypothesis of magic in the HPMOR universe. And finally, there’s some news about the epilogues—plural!

While I’m here, I’ll also mention that Eliezer has a non-fiction book coming out on September 16th, 2025 and I personally think it would be excellent if many thousands of people pre-ordered that book.

And now, on with the lore!

Characters

Masks 
 

Gretta: Can you please explain the “dramatic masks” idea that we’ve talked about, and how it applies to HPMOR?  

Eliezer: So there's a science fiction and or fantasy author, Stephen R. Donaldson, who made an observation in the afterword to one of his books.^[1] Donaldson says that the difference between drama and melodrama^[2] is that in a drama, the characters change their masks over the course of the story, and in melodrama, they wear the same masks throughout the story.^[3] 

And in particular, Donaldson gave an example, which was more influential on me than the underlying statement, of how in one of his stories, it starts out with a victim, a victimizer, and a rescuer. And then by the end of the story, they have all exchanged masks.  

Gretta: Okay. So three people, three masks. And they rotate. And I just want to clarify, when we're talking about masks, we're not talking about something that a character is pretending to do or be.  

Eliezer: Yeah. This is the literary sense of mask. Like a role that a person wears inside the story, whether or not they're conscious of it. 

Gretta: So harkening back to like stage plays where people would literally wear a physical mask in order to indicate what character they're playing. 

Eliezer: Right. These are the masks of the stage play, not masks inside the play. They're masks outside the play. Denoting which character you are. 

And in a drama, according to Donaldson, they rotate. Now, Donaldson’s example is literarily perfect,^[4] whereas HPMOR does not quite stand up the same way. There are only two masks for three people, and the masks themselves are different.

But by the end of the story the mysterious old wizard mask has moved from Dumbledore to Harry, and Harry's brash young hero mask has moved to Hermione. (Hermione's mask does not, so far as I noticed, move to Dumbledore.)  

Gretta: What mask was Hermione wearing at the beginning of the story?  
 

Eliezer: At the beginning of the story, she’s not quite asserting herself as having a mask. School know-it-all, maybe?

By the time she's in the middle of the story, she's got much more complicated things going on. She has multiple self concepts, plus she’s fighting against concepts imposed upon her by the school.
 

Gretta: What are her multiple self concepts? 
 

Eliezer: To answer that, I need to back up a bit. This might sound initially like it’s not quite about characters. Orson Scott Card, I believe, observed that while a conflict between good and evil might hold the attention of some readers, a conflict between good and good can be much stronger than that.^[5]

And why is this? Because for the same reason that a conflict between two strong forces is more literarily interesting than a conflict between a strong force and a weak force, if only one side has good arguments, that's less of an interesting debate than if both sides have strong arguments. 

And the extension of this to characters, and I don't actually remember at this point, if this exact way of phrasing it is original to me or not, is that you might think of a three dimensional character as one who contains at least two two-dimensional characters. 

Like, you just take a bunch of flat characters and put them all into the same person, and now, lo and behold, you have a three dimensional character. 

The less interesting version of this is if the character has a good side and evil side, and/or a sympathetic side and an unsympathetic side. And the much stronger version of it is when they've got multiple sympathetic sides in conflict. 

So coming back to Hermione — Hermione is, on the one hand, the hero, and on the other hand, a sensible young lady who has way too much common sense to go in for that sort of thing, both in the same person. 
 

Gretta: Way too much common sense to go in for being a hero?
 

Eliezer: Yeah. At first, she’s too sensible to do all this dangerous stuff that Harry does — though later, she leans into the hero side and she goes off and does dangerous stuff too.  
 

Gretta: I see. She knows better than that. She knows better than to take these kind of risks, or —  
 

Eliezer: Yeah, or to get herself into this sort of trouble. She has this drive to assert her reality independently of Harry's, despite how the lumpenproletariat of Hogwarts try to cast Hermione as Harry’s tagalong romantic interest, as a bit player in Harry’s story. Harry has a lot of sympathy for Hermione’s plight. He wouldn’t like it if someone tried to cast him as the sidekick, either, so he fights alongside her against the gossip network’s attempts to typecast her, but it doesn’t particularly work, Hogwarts continues to apply that false trope to Hermione.

And this is like a mask that she wears that is independent of her actual heroism. There's some amount of performative heroism she's doing to distinguish herself from Harry, but somewhat separately from whether she is an actual hero or not. Sometimes the actual heroism and the performative heroism overlap.  
 

Gretta: What are some examples of performative heroism versus real heroism on Hermione's part?  
 

Eliezer: So the Society for the Promotion of Heroic Equality for Witches (SPHEW) is Hermione consciously wearing the hero mask. When she asks, “How can I be a hero?" she is consciously performing the hero role, consciously wearing the mask.^[6] 

But also, she hears the echoing cry of the phoenix, runs into an actual instance of bullying and stops it without very much thinking about it.^[7] And that's actual heroism. 
 

Gretta: What happens to Dumbledore when he takes off the wise old wizard mask?  
 

Eliezer: Inside the story, when Dumbledore loses his wise old wizard mask, he gets taken off the board immediately thereafter. He’s snapped out of time, sealed inside the mirror. Dumbledore knew that something like that was going to happen. He prepared for it in advance.

But it’s also interesting to consider what we learn about Dumbledore, who he really was, underneath that wise old wizard mask, which was after all just a role he was playing, and a role that he lost at the end.

When we find out that Dumbledore has been reading prophecies, this changes his apparent role in the story even in retrospect. It’s a moment of not just changing ongoing roles but also of revealing that he had a different story role than we thought on first readthrough. Now his actions make sense in a different way. We know what he was thinking and not just what he was doing.

We also find out that he was mistaken about a few of the prophecies. He thought some of them were about himself, but they were actually about Professor Quirrell, who was also Harry’s mentor.

On the object level, though, what happens is that he’s out of the game.
 

Gretta: Yeah, it's rough when there's no mask for you anymore. It's like playing musical chairs and, whoops, no chair for you.  
 

Eliezer: Yeah. Dumbledore might get one back at some point. That would be a matter for the future of the story. 
 

Imperfect Characters
 

Gretta: In my writing books, it says to give your characters and especially your protagonist flaws, but you write about having respect for your characters, including for your villains. 

So what in your mind constitutes a respectable flaw?  
 

Eliezer: There are many kinds of respectable flaws. But a very strong, classic pathway is to take a mistake that you made in the past and that you're still sympathetic to yourself for having made.

You're like, “Yeah, that was a mistake, but I had reasons for that mistake that was not just me being stupid, all of my books gave me the wrong advice, I was trying to do the right thing there. I had no way of knowing this.” 

And I'm not saying to go around being sympathetic for yourself to yourself for all your mistakes.  But maybe there are some that, despite your strong Irorian self-improving heart, you can still manage to find some sympathy for yourself for making. And especially, maybe you remember how at the time it didn't seem like a flaw to you. You were not going around being like, “And today I shall be a flawed character.” You were trying to do the right thing, and not perform doing that in any flawed way. But then you made the mistake anyway. 
 

Gretta: So does this mean that you can only write characters who are flawed in the same ways that you personally have ever been flawed? Or is that just one wellspring for it?  
 

Eliezer: That's one wellspring. And the thing I would say is just keep yourself to the same standards when you're inventing whole new flaws. 

The thing that you may remember about your own flaws that you're still sympathetic about, is that you did not arrive at these flaws by wearing the flawed mask in the theater and setting out to be flawed that way, so that you could have sympathetic flaws to your reader. No. You made a mistake. You screwed up even though you were trying.  
 

Gretta: So now let's bring it back to HPMOR. Could you please run through some characters and tell me what their flaws are, how you conceived of them, and how you made sure that they were respectable flaws?  
 

Eliezer: So McGonagall. Some people thought that I treated McGonagall unfairly. If so, I wasn't trying to. 

I was trying to write McGonagall as not yet up to Dumbledore's caliber for a wise old mentor. She has the potential to become headmistress of Hogwarts and raise future generations to be people with strong integrity. But initially, she is mainly trying to keep these kids under control. That to me does not seem like an unsympathetic motivation, but it is not as large as it could be, and it leads her into some errors. In time she does come to regard it as a flaw within herself, and thereby change. 

Then take Harry. Harry's, like, gung-ho. I sometimes tell people that Harry is me at age eighteen, but with my Wisdom and Constitution scores reversed and all the brakes taken off. So one of Harry's flaws is that he doesn't have his brakes on. 

I charged ahead more when I was young than I do now. Maybe never quite as much as Harry, but more. And when I look back at myself, I don’t see someone who made entirely defensible mistakes, knowing everything meta that I now know. I see somebody who charged ahead and made mistakes, like Harry, but also somebody who knew a bit more than usual, got some things right that others got wrong, and was trying to do the right thing. This is what I draw on to respect a character like Harry. I know what it is like to be a coherent person who is trying to reflect on himself and still misses some things.
 

Gretta: So by charging ahead, you mean he acts when he would benefit by instead thinking longer first? 
 

Eliezer: Yeah. Probably not the way I would've phrased it, but also a thing that is occasionally true of him.

Only it's not necessarily thinking longer. If you think the same thoughts for longer, you're not necessarily gonna arrive at a different destination. 
 

Gretta: Does he consider too few possibilities?  
 

Eliezer: We all consider too few possibilities. We literally cannot fit enough possibilities in our head for the truth to reliably be inside our considered hypothesis space. Harry has just not had enough bad stuff happen to him at the start of the story.  
 

Gretta: His priors are too optimistic.  
 

Eliezer: Yeah.  
 

Gretta: His parents are nice.  
 

Eliezer: He doesn't realize that, of course. He doesn't know that he is in a story with a nice version of his parents. Yeah. But they are nice.  
 

Gretta: Yeah, they are. 

What about Draco? What are Draco's flaws?  
 

Eliezer: You might more strongly ask, what are Draco's strengths? Or something like, how do you even set up Draco such that, in the course of being a Death Eater, he is not performing the flaws, being the character that has been handed the flaw card — but instead merely is flawed.

And my answer there is, he's a good kid who wants to do what his father tells him to do, and live up to the morals that his father has inculcated in him and carry on the honor of House Malfoy and all that. And he doesn't know that he's supposed to be the villain. 

And this is his strength. Nobody at any point has told Draco that he is the villain of the story and in the end that means that he's not.  
 

Gretta: Yeah. Cool. Who else would be a good one to touch on here?  
 

Eliezer: Pansy Parkinson just wears her flaw mask and doesn't know that she's supposed to be wearing anything else. 

She's a minor character. She has like only a few lines or, like one scene. And is just straight up wrong as far as I can remember. 

And this is not true of many people in HPMOR, but — 
 

Gretta: I can't remember what her deal was. Can you remind me?  
 

Eliezer: I think she has a couple of unsympathetic lines here and there, and is mainly on screen at the point where Tracy Davidson deceives her into believing that she has eaten her soul.  

Gretta: Got it. So for a very minor character, they can just be one-dimensionally bad, and this is fine.

Let’s go back to the general idea of character flaws. So far you mentioned one good wellspring for respectable flaws: mistakes you, the author, have made in the past. But here’s another framework, or generator for flaws.

I watched the Sanderson lectures and he talks about a few different kinds of flaws you can give your characters, and I found this helpful to think about. 

Sanderson says you can give your characters a moral flaw, like being greedy. But you can also give them restrictions or limitations. A restriction is something like Superman's moral code, where there are actions that he will not take because he has this moral code that's more important to him. And a limitation might be something like, I don't know, you're missing a limb. So there's actions that other people can take that you can't take 'cause you don't have the arm.

Eliezer: I don't think of those as character flaws, per se. 
 

Gretta: Yeah, it's not so much that they're categories of flaws according to Sanderson. It's more like when you're trying to make a character and you'd like that character, not just to be the nicest, most awesome, most powerful. It's boring to have a character who's just OP^[8] and everything is great for them. These are some different ways you can hobble your protagonist. 
 

Eliezer: Weaknesses, let us call them weaknesses. 
 

Gretta: Perfect. Yes. These are different ways you can hobble or shape your protagonist so that they have a harder time accomplishing their goals, but also they are more textured, more themselves.

Do you ever think about those other kinds of restrictions and limitations as being a useful way to shape a character? 
 

Eliezer: Sure. Harry's Time-Turner is limited to six hours.

But overall, character weaknesses are among the relatively trickier things to navigate. It's all too easy for weaknesses to just visibly be grafted onto a mask. 

If your character is blind, there's this whole delicate line to walk: “How do I reflect the actual magnitude of how hard this hits them without having this be all the character’s about?” Or maybe it is all the character’s about, that's a different set of thin lines to walk. 

And especially to all the beginning writers out there, before you say, "how shall I take a weakness and slap it onto this character?" First ask if there are just organic vulnerabilities in this character that you don't need to slap on top. And even before that, ask, can you just strengthen the opposition, the problems, the environment, the antagonist.  
 

Gretta: Okay. You made two points there. Say more about organic vulnerabilities?  
 

Eliezer: Who needs a special vulnerability to magic when you've already established that this character has the kind of moral code that can get them into trouble with a more powerful opponent? 
 

Gretta: So instead of throwing more weaknesses at them, check and see if you fully plumbed the depths of the weaknesses they've already got, is that close?  
 

Eliezer: Yeah. And if you feel like a weakness is just inherently part of a character and not in a looking down on them sort of way, but, like, this delicate sculpture all fits together, then by all means have that weakness there. 

But if somebody says, "Ah, your character's too strong. You need to slap some extra weaknesses on there." Then I'm like, “Oh, this is not about to end well, for this burgeoning young author.”  
 

Gretta: I think I understood the other point, which is: don't make your character weaker, make everybody else stronger, and then you have more epic battles. 
 

Eliezer: Yeah. There's a version of HPMOR where you can imagine some author who had received less good advice thinking, "I've got my very rational character. They’re very intelligent, that's a strength. I gotta slap a weakness in there. How about if he's totally clueless about emotions? How about if he doesn't understand other people?"

And where HPMOR goes instead is,"Alright. Draco's got some good training. Hermione is gonna beat the pants off of Harry in all his classes except for broomstick riding. The Defence Professor is gonna be the older, wiser, and more evil version of himself. And Dumbledore is gonna have access to all the prophecies." 

I didn't slap a bunch of weaknesses on Harry. I just put him in an environment where the character could hold together without needing a bunch of weaknesses slapped on top, like rotten cherries on a cake.  
 

Gretta: Gross. 
 

Make All the Characters Awesome 
 

Eliezer: So to generalize that, let’s talk about the principle of “Make All the Characters Awesome.” This was an explicit process as I was envisioning the story, where I thought, for each character, how can I make this character awesome?

Take Crabbe and Goyle, for instance. I had an explicit process of flipping through various ideas, like, “Okay. Can I have them be like the Secret Masterminds who are running Draco from behind the scenes? No, because then Draco's not awesome.” 

“Can they be Secret Masterminds running all of Slytherin from behind the scenes? No, because that doesn't really fit.”

“Could they be Those Two Bad Guys, as TVTropes named the trope? I think this trope is used in Pulp Fiction and maybe in Neverwhere, if I’m remembering the correct Neil Gaiman novel. Anyway, so I'm like, “How about if there's Those Two Bad Guys?” And I thought, “Eh, it doesn't quite fit. It's been done before. It's a little arbitrary. Why is this trope showing up here?” 

And then I thought, “No, no, see, Crabbe and Goyle saw plays with Those Two Bad Guys as kids, and that's who they think they're supposed to be!” And then I was like, “Alright, this is adequately awesome.” And then I could stop trying to figure out how to make those two characters awesome and move on to the next character.

Gretta: Let’s do one more.

Eliezer: Sure. How about Luna Lovegood?

A fundamental fact about Harry Potter and the Methods of Rationality is, it's not quite set in the world of canon, it's set in the world of fan fiction. And almost every fan fiction out there makes Luna Lovegood awesome. So this wasn’t just me making every character awesome, this was a required element. 

But HPMOR is set in Harry’s first year at Hogwarts, and Luna is younger than Harry, so she’s not even enrolled at Hogwarts yet.

So I put a lot of effort into figuring out any way that she could be onscreen at all and awesome.

I landed on having her write all the Quibbler headlines. Had we ever made it to the epilogue, she would've been onscreen and even more awesome.^[9]

Hermione as Mary Sue 
 

Eliezer: While we’re talking about characters, I want to tell you a little-known aspect of Hermione Granger. I wrote her explicitly to be a deconstruction of the Mary Sue. Some people accused J. K. Rowling of having made Hermione Granger a Mary Sue. And other people were like, how dare you? Nobody would look twice at this character if she was male.  
 

Gretta: Please explain Mary Sue, because some people aren't going to know what that is. 
 

Eliezer: Ah, golly. Now I feel old.

So long ago, I believe there was a character named Mary Sue in one of the first fan fictions. It might have been a Star Trek fanfiction, I’m not sure.^[10] In this story, a character named Mary Sue came along, and she was stronger and smarter and prettier than the original characters. She just took over all the story and solved all the problems. In some versions of this legend she bore a certain resemblance to the author, except of course for being prettier.

And so Mary Sue came to denote this perfect character who steps in and solves all the problems and is always right. She’s stronger and prettier and takes over the story. Sometimes she turns out to be secretly related to the original characters despite having not been in the original story.  
 

Gretta: And so people accused Rowling of making Hermione a Mary Sue.  
 

Eliezer: Yeah, on account of Hermione being good in class and sometimes stronger than Harry at things.  
 

Gretta: And then other people said, “Come on, if she was a boy, it would be fine for Harry to have a rival. You’re only mad because she's a girl.” 
 

Eliezer: Sort of? I don't think they were really rivals in the original Harry Potter because canon Harry Potter wasn't that good at academics. 

Anyway, I set out to make Hermione check every single box in the Mary Sue trope. But you probably don’t even notice that I did it, because the thing that actually makes a character pose the literary problems of a Mary Sue has nothing to do with whether you die three days before Easter and later come back from the dead.

(I thought about having her die on Good Friday but I thought that was just a little too unsubtle. As it turned out, I was just vastly overestimating clarity and I wish I’d straight up had her die on Good Friday.)

So yeah, I had her beat Harry at all of their classes except broomstick riding. I had her die and come back from the dead. I gave her pearly white teeth made of unicorn horn. I gave her the reputation for being the one who destroyed Voldemort, just because he dared to try to touch her.

And then there was one part that was more subtle. I think very few readers and only the most obsessive ones on Reddit even guessed at this one, but Hermione is secretly the grand-niece of Professor McGonagall. McGonagall has a dead sister who died in a war, while Hermione's mother thinks that probably her mother died in that war.  
 

Gretta: Okay. So a very subtle hint.  
 

Eliezer: Yeah, very subtle hint. And also later on, you see McGonagall holding Hermione, and the text remarks as if she were holding her daughter or maybe granddaughter.^[11]  
 

Gretta: So you're really trying to check all the boxes on the Mary Sue trope.  
 

Eliezer: Yeah. There is no other reason for Hermione and Professor McGonagall to be related, except that I wanted Hermione to have the supposedly Mary Sue property of being secretly the relative of one of the existing characters.
 

Gretta: But you never hear anyone complain that Hermione just took over the story of HPMOR. 
 

Eliezer: That's because she didn't! So there you go, that's it, that's all that a Mary Sue isn't. Hermione didn't get to steamroll over everything. The story didn't reshape itself entirely around her. The other characters weren't there just to be part of her magnificence. 

And that's all a Mary Sue really is. Who cares about a character coming back from the dead or having pearly white teeth made of unicorn horn? 
 

Who’s the Main Character?
 

Gretta: Most people would probably just say that Harry is the main character of HPMOR, but you’ve told me it’s a lot more complicated than that. So how many protagonists does HPMOR have according to you, and according to the characters themselves?  
 

Eliezer: When you've got something as complicated and occasionally meta as HPMOR, the concept of a protagonist does tend to blur a little bit.

There are at least three ways to look at it. One, which characters see themselves as the “main character” from their own viewpoint? Two, who is the viewpoint character? And three, who makes choices that move the story?

Almost everyone is the main character from their own perspective, at least in HPMOR. I am not sure what the ratio is in the real world.  
 

Gretta: Is there anyone in HPMOR who is not?  
 

Eliezer: So for example, Professor McGonagall doesn't see the world as it relates to herself. She sees the world as it relates to Hogwarts.

But if you think about that second category, viewpoint characters, then Harry, Hermione, and Draco are the most obvious ones. Then we get into secondary viewpoint characters like Snape or McGonagall.  
 

Gretta: Does Neville think he's the main character?  
 

Eliezer: No, but the story sure treats him as one whenever we take on his viewpoint. 

Neville sees the parts of the world that relate to Neville. Neville thinks about how it's his fault that Hermione got killed, or that Bellatrix Black has escaped. From Neville’s perspective, obviously these events are part of Neville's story. 
 

Gretta: Yeah. Okay. That makes sense. 

Let’s talk about the third category. There's an awful lot of students at Hogwarts. Most of them are not actually moving and shaking, making choices that drive the story.  
 

Eliezer: Yeah. But moving and shaking is a very distinct quality from being the main character or a viewpoint character. Dumbledore is making a fair number of choices that move the story. But the viewpoint does not tend to linger on him. And he knows perfectly well that Harry is the main character.  
 

Gretta: So what does it mean for Dumbledore to think that Harry is the main character?  
 

Eliezer: Dumbledore knows the plot more or less. Not in a literal sense, but Dumbledore knows the larger plot. He knows that large events are moving and Harry's going to drive them. He's not quite sure of the extent to which the same holds of Hermione. 

And Dumbledore is pretending to be this person who believes in tropes, as opposed to a person who has read the prophecies. So he is constantly talking as if Harry is the main character as a trope, not expecting to be believed, because the people he is talking to know that they are not characters in a story. Meanwhile Dumbledore is taking great quiet amusement that Harry is the for-real main character in prophecy and not even Harry knows it.^[12]

Eliezer: Also worth noting and in a very similar vein, there's a lot of Only Sane People in Hogwarts. People who are all, according to their own story viewpoint, the Only Sane Person and with considerable justification, include Harry, Quirrell, Dumbledore, Hermione, McGonagall, Susan Bones, and Amelia Bones. Draco Malfoy sure sees himself that way too. Even Daphne Greengrass, at one or two points, wonders when she became the only sane person in Hogwarts. It's not quite the same thing as seeing yourself as the main character or protagonist, but it's related -- the sense that you're the only one who's not just bound up in the mad movements of the world, as the mad other people enact their play. Giving that feature to everyone's own viewpoint is a similar sort of literary motion to making them all their own viewpoint's protagonist.

Contrast canon Harry Potter's Voldemort, who does treat Harry Potter as the main character. Voldemort does not seem to have much to do with his time on Earth besides being a villain over Harry Potter. His plans mainly center on Harry Potter or threatening things valuable to Harry Potter. You can tell that Voldemort is not at the center of his own story.

Plot

Characters interfering with plot 
 

Gretta: You say that any level one intelligent character will try to toss your plot out the window. Do you remember any instances of this happening to you while you were writing HPMOR?  
 

Eliezer: Oh, yeah. Let me think back here for a second. 

So in terms of characters, like just straight up announcing that they will not cooperate with the story you have written, there is a good example in the original version of the Azkaban breakout. I had planned for Harry to transfigure the rocket for himself without any other assistance and ride that rocket out. 

And I realized that this would not work and Harry was inevitably going to die. And that even if I tried to get away with ruling by authorial fiat that it worked, my readers wouldn't believe it, and also Harry himself would just not have done that. 

I think there were several points in the Azkaban arc where Harry was like, "Nope, I'm not doing that. This is suicidal. I need to invent something else." And I was like, “Okay.”  
 

Gretta: Alright, so you were making life too easy on yourself. You were grabbing for an easy solution and then your character was like, “I don't buy it.” 
 

Eliezer: The classic example, from my perspective, is when you're trying to steer your character into trouble and your character says, “screw that." 
 

Gretta: What you just said was the opposite. You weren't trying to steer Harry into trouble. You were trying to get him to escape the tower and then he wouldn't.  
 

Eliezer: Yes, but I was having him go down the corridor of the prison without having invented, like, a Patronus substitute or something. 

This might not be the best example, but I do remember the Azkaban arc as my characters being like, “Why would I do that?" And then you have to manipulate external conditions to cause them to actually do the things you want them to do.

Oh, here’s a better example. How could the Defence Professor get Hermione into a position of conflict with Draco? In the first drafts and outlines of the story, I didn't realize, there was no indication that he would have to go to such lengths. It turned out to be hard even to get Hermione to the point where she could be false-memory-charmed about having tried to kill Draco. It took multiple setup chapters.

The Defence Professor inside the story had to go pretty hard on setting that up, 'cause Hermione didn't particularly want to cooperate with the Defence Professor's first ideas and my own first draft.  
 

Gretta: What were Hermione's objections?  
 

Eliezer: “That's evil. I ain't doing it even if somebody sets me up to think I have a reason.” 

And similarly The Society for the Promotion of Heroic Equality for Witches. I think there's a bunch of things inside my first story ideas where these sensible young ladies were like, “we are not going to do that." And I was like, “... yeah, fair.” I don't remember the specifics, but I was like, “Yeah, okay. I will have to give you a bigger push. So… what if you got this mysterious note?”^[13] Or, “what if one of your people turned out to have more firepower than you expected them to have?”^[14]

I'm trying to remember whether I, at any point, had Chamber of Secrets Shenanigans Plans, which Harry derailed by just sensibly telling Professor McGonagall about it. But I just don't remember at this point if that was ever true.  
 

Gretta: Yeah, a major flaw in many books about young wizards or just children in general is, “Oh my god, why didn't you just ask a grownup for help?” 
 

Eliezer: Yep.  
 

Gretta: And how did you deal with that in this book?  
 

Eliezer: By giving all of the people who would otherwise have derailed the plots that way, adequate reason to suspect all of the grownups they could have potentially talked to. For example, Harry sees Dumbledore setting fire to a chicken. No way Harry’s going to Dumbledore for sane help after that. 

By the time Harry's getting himself into real trouble, I had to make sure McGonagall had acted as an obstacle to him. McGonagall has to be maneuvered into telling Harry that she doesn't want to hear anything wrong about the Defence Professor. Yeah, it's played for laughs at the time. But really this is me asking, "How the hell am I gonna prevent these people from being sensible?" 

And the answer was: “All right. There is a curse on the Defence Professor position. There has always been a curse on the Defence Professor position. The school has adapted to it. Harry has gotten into just the right kind of shenanigan to cause McGonagall to panic about this, and give Harry the instructions he needs to hear to prevent him from just taking certain matters to McGonagall.”  
 

Setting up Plot Twists

Gretta: Yeah. Okay. So on that note, you wrote this one chapter at a time. You knew in general where you were going the whole time, and you had some of the major building blocks in mind. 

But this book is a very layered book with forward references and, like, forward references to forward references. There's so much going on here, how did you do it?  
 

Eliezer: In part by writing a bunch of later scenes out in some detail. They did have to be re-written when I got there. 

For example, the troll killing Hermione was written out, not just in outline form, but line by line, way in advance.  
 

Gretta: Okay. That is a more comforting answer than I actually expected to get from you. I expected you to say, “I held it all in my head because I am just that good.”
 

Eliezer: I held surprising amounts of it in my head because I am, or at least was at that age, just that good. But I did not hold it all in my head. There were outlines, there were places where things were going to go. And it didn't fit together perfectly. I had to try so hard to close the parentheses. I put so much effort into, “Oh no, I opened these parentheses. Now I must close these parentheses.” I would internally scream and struggle invisibly, or even visibly, for several chapters to do that.  
 

Gretta: Okay. Can you think of any parentheses that particularly irked you, that were very hard to close?  
 

Eliezer: The example that leaps out in my mind is — trying to arrive at a point where would make sense to have the aurors tromp in and arrest Hermione Granger for the murder of Draco Malfoy, without that seeming to come completely out of the blue. 

The entire Society for the Promotion of Heroic Equality for Witches was not in the original outline. SPHEW is just me trying to set it up so that, by the time these people come in and arrest Hermione, it actually makes sense. 

And her arrest had to be a consequence of her own actions, in at least some sense, for certain themes of the story to hold together. In real life, stuff happens to trash you all the time, but inside the story, this had to be, somehow and however loosely, Hermione's knowing choice. 
 

Gretta: So you had to do a lot of back propagation. There were many beats you were trying to hit later in the story and it just had backwards implications, layers and layers deep.  
 

Eliezer: And that works in both directions. So many chapters, I'm trying to get this story to where it has to be in a future place. And then in so many future places, I'm doing so much work to close the parentheses that opened in an earlier chapter. That's how I ended up writing a layered story even though I was publishing it linearly, as a serial. 
 

Time-Turner Plots 
 

Gretta: While we're on the subject of plot intricacy, tell me about how you reasoned through the Time-Turner plots. 
 

Eliezer: Someone once asked me, “What sort of note-taking or outline do you use for the Time-Turner sections? It seems hard to keep it all self-consistent.” 

And this time the answer is, “I just write it." I wrote those sections in short, connected writing sessions and published a bunch of closely related serial events that I could just hold in my head. I couldn’t hold the whole story's plot from start to finish, but the Time-Turner sections, I could. 

That person might have felt impressed, I’m not sure, but it’s not as impressive as it looks. They were trying to decode the plot I had written, and they were probably juggling multiple possibilities in their head until the evidence came in, and I only had to hold one possibility in my mind and sweep it forward. 

This would actually catch me out sometimes! A lot of times my readers would see completely valid alternative interpretations that I'd never intended, and that I had arguably inadvertently foreshadowed. But because I was only holding my intended interpretation in mind, I didn’t anticipate what they would see. 

So for example, some people made a very clear case that I clearly foreshadowed that Professor Quirrell was a time traveling version of Harry. Because in chapters quite close to where this sense of doom was introduced, I happen to have Harry thinking, in the course of discovering Time-Turners, that time-reversed matter looks like anti-matter and explodes when brought into contact with matter. This is obviously me telling all the attentive readers that the reason for this sense of doom is that Professor Quirrell is a time traveling version of Harry. It makes sense! It's also false, it's not what I meant. I wouldn't have left that red herring if I'd thought about it. But because I knew what I meant, I didn't realize it was a red herring.  
 

Slashfic? 
 

Gretta: I have two sex-related questions for you about this mostly PG-13 rated book.

My first question is about Quirrell’s humiliation of Harry at the end of chapter 19. Quirrell forces Harry to submit while several bigger students incapacitate him. He requires Harry to beg for mercy before calling the bullies off. And then when it’s over, Quirrell praises Harry and sends him to a cozy room with a light novel and some chocolate.

When I read that, I thought, “Oh, I've just read some slashfic,^[15] how daring," but you've told me that this was not at all what you intended. Say more.  
 

Eliezer: You are not the first person to bring this up. My partner at the time I wrote HPMOR also claimed to me that Harry and Professor Quirrell had the BDSM nature. And I was like, “No, but BDSM sometimes has the Harry / Quirrell nature.” 

Let’s say you subject somebody to a highly stressful experience (which you might want to do for any number of reasons). And furthermore, let’s say you are clever, as Voldemort is, and you don’t want to break them, and you want them not to resent you afterwards — 

Putting them in a quiet room with some chocolate is the obvious thing to do. You don't actually need to be in a kinky or romantic relationship with somebody to give them aftercare. You can also be Voldemort and have plots.  
 

Gretta: Were you surprised when some people read chapters 19 and 20 and came away thinking they just read some BDSM? 
 

Eliezer: I think that relatively few people did report that reaction to me. A much more commonly reported reaction was of immense mood whiplash. And in this, they were simply correct.  

There was too much mood whiplash, too fast. And a bunch of people were like, “What the hell is going on at that school?”  

And I was like, “Have you read canon? This scene would have fit right in with the stuff that teachers are doing in canon Harry Potter.”

Gretta: Yeah, Dolores Umbridge does some absolutely horrible things to the children in canon. 
 

Eliezer: Or Snape. And I felt like this fit right into canon. 

But in HPMOR, this is the first sign of things having escalated to that level. There was some amount of that from Snape earlier, but Snape’s cruelty was undercut because it was clear that Snape had cooperative reasons for pulling that particular shenanigan.^[16] 

Quirrell’s cruelty in chapter 19 is inadequately foreshadowed. To write it better, something like that, but less so, needed to happen to Harry earlier.  
 

Gretta: So you have a regret as an author?  
 

Eliezer: I have a regret as an author about the extent to which many people correctly experienced this as coming, if not out of nowhere, then out of, like, inadequately somewhere. 
 

Gretta: Okay. So it was just too harsh, too sudden.  
 

Eliezer: Yeah. Whiplash in that it doesn’t match with the prior tone.