Hey everyone, welcome back to the screen running life. I'm Meg Lafour.

And I'm Lorian McKenna. And on the show we talk a lot about active main

characters and making sure they drive the plot, which is easier said than done.

Because of that, we wanted to discuss it and talk about a list of some strategies that you can implement in your own writing to diagnose

or treat an active protagonist in your work.

But before we do that, we're going to be chatting with TSL listener Laurel Senec about a lovely

and vulnerable email she sent us that we all related to.

Laurel is a member of our TSL Workshop community which includes monthly story workshops

where our members get to get feedback from us about ideas they're working through and

Laurel recently shared her really fun idea for an animated TV kids show and

she experienced a complicated cocktail of emotions after getting notes from us and

as writers we really understood

where you were coming from so Laura welcome to the show thank you and I see that

crying pillow back there I could have used this.

Yes, Lauren and I both have crying pillows, TSL crying pillows, which we highly recommend to everybody.

Laura, would you mind reading the email you sent to us?

Sure.

Dear TSL, I want to share some feedback in a tiny confession about the story workshop. I hope you won't think I'm nuts, but as I digest it all, I realize I'm way more nuts than I ever gave myself credit for.

As soon as Meg said, why surfers? I hit a fourth dimension crazy. I told my

husband she had an issue with surfers and we speculated that an air-do well

surfer broke her heart.

Over and over I replayed these lines, do you love capers? I didn't hear you say you love capers.

...