Always remind the reader of the central contradiction of the novel
Great contradictions lend a novel its heart and soul. If the reader forgets what drives the protagonist, he won’t care enough to read the book. We must create a contradiction for our protagonist that is almost fatally unbearable to him. Suppose a Jewish girl meets and falls in love with a boy who turns out to be strongly anti-Semitic. She’s afraid to confess to the boy that she’s Jewish. She wants to introduce him to her parents, but she knows that it’s impossible, because it was the Nazis that gassed her parents’ parents in one of the death camps. We can feel the enormous contradiction, can’t we?
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