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Don’t turn your characters into contortionists


Photo by Ron Sombilon Media, Art and Photography

Don’t turn your characters into contortionists! That’s my big writing lesson this week.

I had what I thought was a good idea. I had two interesting and complex characters, with deep emotional conflict. I had a setting I like, London at Christmas.

What I didn’t have was a story that worked.

My mission is to write a 10 to 15 K romantic novella, based on the song Santa Baby, ready to submit by July 10. It took doing this week’s course homework for the writing course I’m enrolled in to figure out what wasn’t working. A key part of the homework is to write a sentence summarising the story in 30 words or less.

I couldn’t do it! The characters sounded hopelessly unsympathetic for a light Christmas novella, even to me who created them. I needed to explain too much. There was too much in the plot that was dark and heavy (death of a key secondary character). Sheesh, I don’t know that the secondary characters should even have names in a 10K novella, let alone a crucial role to play in the character arc for the hero or heroine!

 The other thing that gave me a big clue was that I really couldn’t fill in the main pre-writing tools I use for these characters as I had them. If I can’t do that, I know there’s something wrong!

I’d spent all week doing story development. Started writing the story, but I knew I just didn’t have it right after one chapter. The characters didn’t fit the story, or the story didn’t fit the characters. I’d had to make the characters do things that were too out of character. I’d turned them into contortionists.  No way was this a story that met the brief. I still think I have the seeds of a good story in there, but not for this Call for Submissions.

In the past, this is where I would have given up on having anything to sub for this Call for Submissions, and grabbed at the next new bright shiny story idea.

This time, I kept playing with it. I’ve promised myself to see through a story once I start it, as I’m a serial non-finisher. Ideas for how to change things kept coming. But I had way too much going on for a short novella. The characters had to change too much to get from where they began to a resolution in fifteen thousand words. The plot was so convoluted I needed contortionists as hero and heroine.

I wrote in the last entry how I realised I had the heroine all wrong. I’d made her relate to the words of the song way too literally. Once I had that, and slept on it, the rest fell into place like dominoes. The hero. The conflict. The resolution.  

It felt almost miraculous how I woke up yesterday knowing just what the story needed. A classic opposites attract romance. Pared right down to the bare minimum, the essence of who the characters are. Yesterday, I did the Save the Cat beatsheet, and the Identity to Essence chart. It worked!

Today, I did an outline, and just finished a very rough draft of chapter one on the Alphasmart so I wouldn’t stop to edit as I went. I feel happy with what I have. It seems to me this is the best story I’ve done, in terms of having the conflict and structure in place, but I’ve thought that before! I’m too close to it to see what I’ve missed or what I have put in that really doesn’t work.

The chapter is too long, at 1800 words, but that’s good because I’ll have lots to play with when the time comes to edit. I’m going to resist the temptation to start tidying it up now. It can stay as it is, gross typos and all, until I have a complete first draft. It should come in at around 18,000, then I’ll need to edit it down to under 15. It I have something that looks a total mess that I HAVE to cut, I won’t be so in love with my own words I miss what need to come out.

That’s the theory anyway!

How much pre-writing planning do you do? Is it different for each story? Any tools you use and recommend?


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A starting point- with my writing room and with the story

Planning is hard work!

It’s been a busy weekend. I’ve planned the work I need to do to transform a small garden shed into a writing room, and I’ve done more planning for my new story, a Christmas themed romantic novella.

I almost have my full shopping list of what I need to buy to fix the shed, I just need to do the sums to work out how much of the timber I need to buy. Insulation, tongue and groove spruce cladding boards to paint a light sunny cream, trim for the edges, perpex to reglaze and double glaze the windows. A big sheet of white coated mdf or similar for the desk, stretching wall to wall, then white bookshelves down either side right up to the door. Touches of bright lime green  and turquoise in the accessories. Cork tiles to use as a pinboard between the desk and a high bookshelf.

I can see how it will look finished. I just hope my skills are up to the job of transforming it!

I’ve decided to leave starting work on this until July. Two reasons- I won’t start the part-time job until mid-July, and I started the new novella with a deadline of July 10. Meeting the deadline will be tough enough without taking more time off from it to work on the shed.

And I’ve just realised tonight while doing the homework for the writing course I’m doing, Holly Lisle’s How to Think Sideways, what it is that’s been niggling me about the story over the past two days. I’m doing lesson 4, Good to Great. I knew I had a good idea, yet I couldn’t get it to work in a way that felt right to me.

In the past week, since I read the Entangled Call for Submissions, I’ve written nearly 6000 words of notes. I’ve almost completely filled in a Beat Sheet (word counts tweaked for a short novella length) and GMC charts for each character (fabulous ones, I’ll post them here as soon as I get time).  I wrote the first 1500 words of the story. But I knew I didn’t have it quite right. My instinct was telling me the story was somehow off, like a wobbly unbalanced wheel, but I couldn’t figure out why or where.

I thought the problem was that I didn’t have a good enough handle on the ending. It was too dependent on outside factors, and not driven enough by decisions the characters make, the emotional growth that’s needed so they can have their happy ever after. I asked before I went to bed for the answer to be in my mind when I woke up. I slept badly, my mind was too active on a million and one things that had nothing to do with the story. I woke up and started morning pages and didn’t have a clue about what the story needed. My mind seemed a total blank.

I asked again anyway. And out it came. the perfect ending to the story. Even five or six hundred words of actual story. Fast and effortless and exactly what the story needed. Amazing. I love it when that happens.

But something still nagged at me, felt off. Not the ending, something else.

Tonight I figured it out. I completely misunderstood my heroine and her motivation and what Christmas meant to her and what that song meant to her (the brief is to write a short romantic novella based on the song Santa Baby). I didn’t have the hero right, either. I have to scrap my first idea of who she is and who he is, and almost do a 180 on it, but it’s right. It makes sense of the story. It fits the ending and the middle I see.

So strange how that happens, but I know it’s right. The story developed way past my initial very literal conception of her character and how she related to the song, but I clung on to it anyway and tried to shoehorn it into the story it didn’t fit any more. 

Now all the pieces click together, with that lovely satisfying clunk, I can really start to write. I have the feeling this story could be less of a challenge than turning the interior below into a cosy all year round writing space!


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Why is this hero perfect for this heroine?


Photo by h.koppdelaney

I know I should be writing. I have been, promise!

It’s 100% pure dreck, but at least I finally got my hero and heroine on the page together. I think I’m going to have some cutting to do so that happens sooner. Always the same issue- too much scene setting and internal monologue before I cut to the real stuff.

Anyway, I’m doing a bit of blog surfing in a ten minute break. And I’m thinking about my character and what her emotional growth will be through the story.

I tend to have an issue here. I want my characters to be likeable, so I make them too nice to start with. I don’t give them enough room to grow.

Now, sometimes being overly nice and agreeable is a character flaw in itself and that character’s arc might be to start developing some no-power and stop letting everyone walk all over them. Or it could be that I suck at writing characters who actually have realistic emotions and characters!

I realised early on than in first draft my hero forgives the heroine far too soon. He’s not angry enough. He can quite rightfully be pissed off with the way she’s behaved. That will be tricky for me to handle, but I can see it’s needed.

What I hadn’t realised was that she also forgives him far too soon.

She starts off angry and upset and determined not to get close and them wham halfway through the story it’s like one slow dance later and she’s melting in his arms, all is forgiven? Come on! Time for me to get real here. There needs to be a bit of a growth process here. The one-step-forward-two-steps-back dance of can-I-trust-him-or-can’t-I, has he really changed?

I realised something big last night. She’s not just angry with him over what he did to her when they dated in their teens. She’s taken that hurt and attached a whole lot of other stuff to it, stuff other people did to her that she’s kidded herself she’s totally okay with. In her mine, he’s the only person who’s hurt her, the only person who’s done something so bad it’s unforgivable. Because he’s wearing her anger over EVERYTHING that’s gone wrong in her life. It makes no sense why she’s as angry with him as she is, why she didn’t just demand he explained it then and there, back at age seventeen when it happened. It also makes perfect sense looked at another way.

Not only is her sudden jump from anger to forgiveness in the first draft not the least bit believable, she’s also being too nice. She needs to be a lot more angry. A lot more hurt and resentful. A lot less likely to forgive. It’s going to take far more than one slow dance to get over this one!

Lightbulb moment- characters don’t have to be ”nice”. Their feelings don’t have to be the least bit rational. They just have to be understandable.

I read a good little free e-book on Crafting Unforgettable Characters last night, by K M Weiland. She said a lot that resonated with me.

When we write characters who are fighting both their circumstances and their own natures, we create characters who are instantly real.

 That’s external and internal conflict explained in a single sentence!

Then today during my ten minute break that seems to have stretched just the teensiest bit, I read a post on Natalie Hartford’s blog, quoting a line from This Means War.

Don’t choose the best guy, choose the guy that brings out the best in you!

That’s exactly why Morgan is the only man for Tash. He may be the man she sees as her worst enemy, the man she loves to hate. But he’s also the only man who will see past her prickly defences and help her change, help her heal her past, help her find the courage to love. He’s the only man who sees the truth of who she is.

And now, that brings me back to what I already knew and had forgotten, Michael Hauge’s advice on writing romance. The reason the characters should be together is because only with each other can they be all they can be. Only with this man, this woman, will they be the best self possible. He talks about the other character being the only one who can see through the self-protective mask the hero or heroine wears, to see the real person within. They may clash on the superficial level, but at the deeper level they, and only they, connect. I bought the recording of his lecture at the RWA Conference last year, which is amazing. He also has this article among many others on his website that are all worth reading- Writing Romantic Comedies.

This quote always makes me get all teary-

In movies, as in real life, both the joy and terror of intimacy grow out of our exposure to those we love. To be accepted for who we are is magical. But once we allow ourselves to be seen in this way, all the dark parts of our personalities – our weaknesses, desires, fears and shortcomings – are brought into the open. The possibility that someone might peer beneath our carefully constructed persona and see who we truly are becomes terrifying. So the dance of pursuit and retreat continues endlessly.

Conscious or not, the lies in romantic comedies are always designed to protect the hero’s image. Better to lie to the person he loves than to expose the unworthy person he believes himself to be.

But of course, the hero’s deception can never work, because it is only by standing up for who he truly is that the hero can achieve real fulfillment and self worth, and connect with the love of his life. The romance character is TRULY the hero’s destiny; she’s the reward for finding the courage to grow and change.

Romantic comedies concern the continual battle between comfort and longing, between fear and desire. We’re all terrified of intimacy, pain and loss, so we all shut down emotionally in one way or another. But the beauty and power of a romantic comedy is that for two hours in the dark we can identify with a hero facing the same eternal struggle. And in the movie theater, we will always grow, and we will always win.

I hope and pray I can bring that level of emotional realness to my stories. Tash isn’t just lying to Morgan about how she feels and how her past has affected her, she’s lying to herself. I hope I can write well enough to do her justice.

And now I better go actually do some more writing instead of talking about it! Back to work tomorrow and I have nowhere near as much written as I hoped to.

Just wondering- what is it that makes your characters perfect for each other in your WiP?


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Story planning, step 281(feels like!)

Well, I had a breakthrough on my story yesterday. Finally figured out why it’s so dull and lifeless and plodding and I’m having to force myself to write instead of coming to it with enthusiasm, all bright eyed and bushy tailed and raring to go.

Pretty basic and straightforward really- there’s no conflict between the characters. The heroine has a goal, and the hero is helping her get it. And yes, they are attracted and there are all sorts of reasons they shouldn’t act on that, but it’s not enough. I have NO external conflict.

I read this article by Michael Hauge on writing romance. It’s geared for scriptwriting, but it works for books too. Seems that what he’s giving there is a roadmap to character based plotting for romance. His view of story really works, IMO. It is a kind of synthesis of all the thinking about story I like best. Please do read the article if you haven’t already seen it!

Anyway, these were the words that resonated with me-

The hero(ine) must pursue some additional visible desire.
Pursuing two goals simultaneously adds originality to the story and accelerates the pace. And when the hero(ine)’s two desires inevitably come into opposition (as I will discuss momentarily), the conflict is increased, along with the audience’s emotional involvement.

The romance character must create obstacles to both the hero(ine)’s desires. Without conflict between the hero(ine) and romance, your screenplay will lack the emotion necessary to sustain the story.

So he looks at romances as a two goal story. The outer desire is the external goal the character starts off with. Then the second goal develops in the course of the story- winning the love of the other character. What mine missed was that Tom wasn’t in any way a block to her external goal, creating the garden. He was a helper, when for real conflict he needs to be a hinderance.

I’ve worked out how to do it, I think. It’s obvious when I look at my set up- I looked in the wrong place for the hero. Yes, he’s going to help her recover from the disaster that threatens her fledgling garden design business, but he’s also going to be the cause of the disaster, dealing with his own serious business problems.

It works. The basic situation is pretty much the same, but the difference in the hero’s background adds loads more drama and conflict. It lets my heroine, who feels kind of wishy-washy at the moment, be more proactive instead of reactive. She’s not sitting around asking for help, she’s got to go out and demand it, and find her Ladyballs in the process!

But it means an almost complete rewrite. Actually, it will probably be easier to rewrite than try jigsawing in the pieces that are
kind-of-usuable-with-some-editing, anyway. And I’m almost certain it’s going to need to be a longer story, at least 20 to 30K, maybe 40K. Trying to develop a believable romance that the characters would make sacrifices for, from a first meeting to HEA in under 15K was never going to work, anyway.

So no chance of meeting the Spring Fling deadline of 1 February. But I think as long as I sub it by the end of Feb, mid-March at the latest, it may still be saleable as a story for this Spring/ early Summer. If not, well there’s next year.

*big sigh* Back to the beginning again.

I’m learning something else about my writing process. I write my way in, yes. A lot of my first two chapters is really backstory that won’t need to be in the completed story.  But it goes further than that. I also often don’t discover what the real conflict is until I’m at least 10 k into the story, or even 20K. Then I get to a point where I know I need to stop and rethink, even if it means having to throw away what I have so far and start over.

I can see what happens. I manufacture a conflict to get me started, but I don’t know the characters well enough at that stage to really know their conflict. I have to write enough to get to know them. That’s when I find out what the conflict really is.

With this change in the hero’s background and how they meet, her inner relationship issues remain the same but are intensified. And he actually has some, when he didn’t that much to begin with. He’s become a much more rounded and developed character. What I’m seeing now is the deeper emotional blocks that lie underneath the obvious superficial internal conflict I manufactured. The characters are real enough now to tell me what their issues are. I’ve created them well enough that the conflict comes from who they are, not from me imposing it on them. So creating more EXTERNAL conflict actually works to deepen their internal conflicts.

I don’t want to start over. But my story will be better for it.

This rewrite could be fun!


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The “big sekrit” as romantic conflict?

Sorry if that last post didn’t make any sense! It was a big oopsie!

I cut and pasted some stuff from an email to save for a future blog post and must have hit Publish instead of Save as Draft! Bugger!

Now I better finish it, but I’m supposed to be writing.

*wail*

Actually, my characters are being seriously uncooperative. That’s what I get for telling them I’d chop the first two chapters, where first she then he gives us some backstory thinly disguised as stuff happening. Their first meeting is in chapter two, and I’m sad to cut that, but I do need to find a better way to get straight into the story. Novellas don’t have the luxury of a slow start.

Though Michael Hauge and The Hero’s Journey both say it’s necessary to start with the character’s Ordinary World first, so the reader understands and empathises with them BEFORE  things start changing forever, that’s difficult in romance, where the expectation is that the hero and heroine will be on the page and in conflict as soon as possible. Even more so in a novella.

For these shorter stories, I somehow need to work out how to do that in a paragraph or less. Definitely no more than a page.

Anyway, Tom and Lissa have retaliated for me telling them I’d cut things by stopping talking to me. I managed to scrape up a few hundred more words the last few days, but the story isn’t flowing. So maybe taking time out to write a blog post isn’t such a bad thing. But I hope they are there and alive and wanting to talk and ready to play when I can start to write later today.

Must remember- first draft first, THEN edit!

Now, this post doesn’t relate so much to the story in working on, which is why I intended to save it until I was writing and rewriting on that does. But here, there aren’t any Big Sekrits used as a plot device to keep the characters apart. In my attempt to keep it simple for a short novella, Tom and Liss have a very obvious thing making it unlikely a relationship would work- an eighteen year age difference.

But I do use the Big Sekrit frequently enough to have noticed a problem with using this as conflict. Unless the secret is a bloody good one and the character has good enough reason not to tell it, the telling can seem anticlimactic. The last thing I want is for a reader to get to the Black Moment and think “What the heck, is that all? She could have told him that a hundred pages ago!”

My last rejected novella, Morgan and Tash’s story, has two sorts of secrets. The heroine left town ten years before without telling him why, and there’s another reason that’s developed since then that means she believes she can’t be with him now. And in my longer romance from the Haven Bay series, Lock and Cady’s story, it all hinged on a secret from her past she was keeping, the reason she left him nine years earlier and meant they could be together now but she couldn’t be truly intimate with him.

Anyway, my CPs were talking about character secrets in general one day last week. Maisey said this-

 I think it’s actually good practice to get the secret out so you can find out what the real, deep conflict is without that in the way.

Very wise! How she gets to be so awesomely knowledgeable about writing at half my age I dunno, but she is.

She says she has to make jokes about BJs the rest of the time to keep the cosmic balance. Maybe that’s right. I’m not so wise, so I don’t need to be so funny either!

The point is, telling the secret earlier can mean the conflict can go even deeper. Telling forces the character to go even further out of their comfort zone to deal with what’s under the secret. Because of course there HAS to be another layer under the secret, feelings of guilt, shame, grief, inadequacy,whatever. It there wasn’t, they wouldn’t be keeping it a secret. 

My stories too often hinge on a Big Sekrit, and I don’t handle the reveal as well as I could. Too many missed opportunities for digging deep into emotion. mainly because I do hang on to those secrets too long.

I’m not sure the other character always needs to know the secret early on. But maybe the reader does, so they can empathise and understand where the character is coming from. There at least have to be hints they have a secret, or the Big Sekrit Reveal as black moment is as unreal and unbelievable for the reader as the character suddenly developing a new superpower ten pages from the end that solves all their problems.

And if a secret is the trigger for the black moment, it had better be BIG. Just plain ordinary big isn’t enough. It has to be huge, earth shattering, the sort of secret someone would die rather than tell. The sort of secret a sane person would throw away the best relationship of their life to hang on to. Or the sort of secret  their equally sane partner would consider ending the relationship over. Thaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat big.

It’s it isn’t that big, maybe it’s better to tell it earlier. Time to dig deeper. Because if the secret isn’t huge enough to risk the love of a lifetime over, there has to be something else hiding underneath it that is.


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Where it all goes wrong…

…So it can all go right.

The Black Moment, that is. When it looks like everything is lost, the hero and heroine will never work things out, that’s it, this relationship is killed dead. The moment when we as writers have to somehow make our reader thing this is the one romance where it’s not going to work out. Because the coming together, the Happy Ever After, is sweeter in direct proportion to how believably bad the Black Moment is.

I’m thinking about this today because one of my CP’s, Maisey, did a marvellous post on Black Moments. It’s good. Read it!

Anyway, she got me thinking.

How I always tend to be too nice to my characters.  I don’t want to make them suffer, I like these story people I created, after all.

Of course, in Supers or single titles we don’t need to break our characters quite as thoroughly as Presents, but they still have to be forced to learn and grow before they get to the point where they can totally commit to this love. Both characters have to work hard to earn their Happy Ever After, whether they want to change or not. Without changing, they aren’t going to get what they want.

Maybe even in Supers and STs they do need to be broken. Those self-protective walls they put around their emotions have to be removed, one way or another. It can be with a smash, or with the slow subtle water on stone wearing away (usually with the character grabbing more stones to try to rebuild that dam before any real emotion leaks through). But yes, there still needs to be that moment when the pressure builds so much that the wall cracks and the emotions come out.

Their emotions become so intense, or the pressure from the other character becomes so strong, that they have no choice. They have to face their deepest relationship blocks, their biggest emotional issues, whatever the internal conflict is that’s stopping them letting themselves let go to love, stopping them being fully present in the relationship. Or they have to close up completely and walk away from this relationship forever.

The Black Moment is the moment when it looks like they might walk. No matter how much the relationship means to them (if only they’d let themselves admit it), those inner self-protective defence mechanisms are stronger. It really could go either way.

The resolution is the moment of surrender. The walls are broken. They CHOOSE to be broken, because at last the love is more important than the self-protection. And that breaking, that emotional openness and vulnerability, is what makes the true love possible.

Of course, this process goes on in real relationships all the time. For me, a lot of this happened slowly over several years, while I was engaged and those early years of my marriage. I do distinctly remember the moment quite early on in our dating when I decided to surrender, to drop my defences, and to let myself fall in love with this man. There were a lot more mini-surrenders after that for both of us, as we learned and grew in our love and came together as a truly committed couple.

LOL, I still have days I want to run away. Because the truth is, sometimes it’s easier to be single, to just have to decide for ourselves, to not have to deal with the emotional complexities of our own and another person’s feelings. It’s like that for my characters, only more so.

In romance, the process has to be more dramatic, just like our characters have to be larger than life. Their secrets have to be bigger, their hurts deeper, their emotional blocks harder to overcome, losing the other character’s love the worst thing that could possibly happen in their lives.

Hmm, that helps me see how it needs to be for my characters.

Now I really have to get writing and stop just talking about it!


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Layering Conflict- When is Enough, Enough

I’m feeling a bit frustrated with my Memorial Day Challenge story and not wanting to write much.

I think if it’s not chosen as one they want to see more of (announced tomorrow afternoon, my time), I might go back to Cady and Lock.

Jack and Kate’s internal conflict feels a bit pathetic. It’s like if someone (maybe his Mom) sat them down and said “Can’t you see he’s crazy about you/ he’s crazy about you?” that would be that for the conflict.

There’s a bit more to it than that, hopefully a lot more to it than that, but that’s the surface layer and it feels weak.

I don’t want to fall in my usual trap of overcomplicating things, but them both feeling rejected because neither of them knew how to handle it when they kissed in their teens so they both played it way too cool is simply not enough to keep two people so right for each other apart!

Next layer- she needs him to keep what is most important in her life, custody of her nephew Mikey. So how does he know she wants him for himself, and it’s not just gratitude.  She knows he promised her brother he’d look after Mikey, so how does she know he really wants her and isn’t just doing the right thing for Mikey and easing his guilt over her brother, and over not being there to help when her sister-in-law was dying.

But there’s more again beneath that- she has so much grief in her recent past, she can’t risk loving anyone else, especially someone set on going back to a war zone. He has this incredible guilt that her brother died and not him. He can’t stay away from his team, because how will he live with himself if more of them die because he’s not there. He has to go back, it’s his whole reason for still being alive.

I guess that should be enough. My old bad habit used to be heaping in more and more external conflict, which just made a huge hot mess of a story. Now I’m aiming to layer deepening internal conflicts. I hope I’m getting it right this time!

I feel better about getting back to the writing now.

And I just realised, what I am really doing is giving into resistance and avoiding the challenge of writing the scene I know will be hard for me, the funny one.  Strange that since I worked out yesterday that’s what I need to do, I’ve found all sorts of reasons not to write! Or not so strange. Understandable really.

I’ve been reading this-The War Of Art: Winning the Inner Creative Battle this week. Powerful stuff. He issues a full-on head-to-head challenge to writers and anyone working creatively to look at the ways they avoid doing the work.

I guess I better go write that scene.

I also guess I better post date this post so it doesn’t appear until tomorrow, seeing I’ve broken the rules by saying which entry was mine. Can’t wait to find out who wrote the entries I loved most!

I also want to study the Super I read last week after I subbed my entry- Beth Andrews’ A Marine for Christmas. A good read! There are some similarities between her heroine and mine- both in the past have been ditsy and irresponsible, now deciding to take on the big responsibilities fate throws at them.

I really want to look at the story structure, pacing. What happens where, where do the turning points fall in the stories, how does she infuse some humor into what is a pretty terrible situation no matter which way you look at it?

I hope that doesn’t count as Resistance too.

I guess it is, as is writing this post, but it’s far more useful procrastination than looking at things on eBay. At least this little bit or procrastination made me properly articulate my characters’ conflicts. That’s my short synopsis half written then!

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