neither your blueprint nor your novel is made up of a prescribed number of scenes, beats, turns, or plot points. As we know, story structure is the by-product of a story well told, not something that you can—or should—impose from the outside in. Your story will change, grow, shrink, and continually shape-shift as you write forward, finding its own organic architecture. Your goal is simple—build your story by creating a plot that will constantly force your increasingly reluctant protagonist to change. Put simply, the stakes will be ratcheting forever upward, even in those moments when it seems
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