I have been steadily reworking my NaNoWriMo submission over the past few weeks, whenever I have some free time at work or a quiet night at home (quit laughing, it DOES happen occasionally). I have been cleaning it up, rewriting the parts I wrote but did not like for various reasons, and adding to it because it still needs another 20K words or so before I reach the conclusion.

While I was doing that, I was reading through some old columns about writing to try and tackle a particular hitch I've come to at a very important crux in the story's progress, and while skimming the basics to find what I was looking for, some advice about writing popped out (that I paraphrase here): "Make sure it's your characters that define the story and not the other way round."

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