Posts by Tracy Hahn-Burkett

Imagining Beyond One’s Own Experience, or What the Fiction Writer Calls “Going to Work”

By Tracy Hahn-Burkett / July 27, 2014 /

It’s not often that one hears a statement that is both undeniably true and contradictory to the nature of everything we do. But at a reception this past spring, I heard such a statement.

A small group of us were discussing the life of the author in whose honor the reception was being held. This author, who had written both a memoir and a novel, had been separated from his family at the age of twelve and forced to become a child soldier in Sierra Leone.

“My son is twelve,” I said. “I try to think of my own son in those shoes…” My voice trailed off as I began to conjure images of my American, middle-class, twelve-year-old son suddenly, violently, torn from me and the rest of our family, forced to survive in lawlessness, impelled to run for his life, left with no choice but to kill and to maim. The effort quickly formed a universe of horrific thoughts in my head that immediately made me want to leave the reception, go home to my son and hold him tightly to me.

“You can’t,” said a man in the group, taking advantage of my external silence.

I faced him. “I try to imagine–”

“You can’t. You can’t know what that’s like unless you’ve been through it. We can’t imagine what that feels like.”

True enough. I can’t. No one can know those acts, that life, for certain, without having been there. I would never presume to write that author’s story.

Yet…

I can imagine something else. I can imagine another person, say, a twelve-year-old child who suffers a terrible loss—maybe she loses her parents in a car crash. Maybe her sister was in the wrong place at the wrong time in Gaza this month. Maybe her brother was a heroin addict and she herself is teetering on the brink, finding herself between “friends” and opportunities to take her life in directions she doesn’t even understand. Or maybe I am fascinated by an ancient culture I’ve heard about in some place I traveled, a native Central American people, and I’m willing to put in the effort to learn about that culture and develop characters. A young protagonist, perhaps, pushed by a traumatic event into a non-traditional role in her culture, challenged in her need to develop into something she’s not. I’m starting to see her already.

None of these specific circumstances have happened to me. But I have the tools to write them if I so desire.

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When We’re Forced to Work Outside Our Own Writing Boxes

By Tracy Hahn-Burkett / May 29, 2014 /

I write best in big chunks of time. I need four or five hours together to become fully immersed in the world where my characters live. I don’t know why I work this way, but I do. It’s the kind of fiction writer I am.

It’s unfortunate, then, that my life right now won’t permit me to write this way. I have a couple of part-time jobs. I have a couple of kids, ages twelve and nine (otherwise known as the “drive me” years). One parent recently passed away and left me with probably a year’s worth of responsibilities, and my other parent requires time and attention. I also have pets, doctors’ appointments, things that break and need fixing, meals that need to be cooked, shopping that needs to get done, a house that needs to be cleaned (okay, so I don’t do a lot of that)–you know, the stuff we all have.

All of this means that my schedule is packed from the moment I awake until the moment I go to sleep. And it frequently changes with little notice. In other words, the four-to-five-hour block of writing time just does not happen.

After struggling for a long while–and failing–to find big blocks of writing time, I finally admitted that something had to change. When I whined about discussed this dilemma with writer friends and mentors, I received some excellent advice to help me restructure my writing:

Make appointments with my characters. Writer Catherine Elcik suggested blocking out appointments with my characters on my calendar just as I would with real people. I use iCal on my laptop and iPhone, and now anyone who looks can see I’ve frequently got time marked off for “meetings” with people who just happen to share my primary characters’ names. I also print the calendar out each week and tape it to my desk. I can’t say I always make every appointment, but having my characters visibly waiting for me, tapping their toes right where I can see them, has kept me more on target than in the past. When life events forced me to stop writing for a while (see below), I found I really missed this structure and it was the first thing I brought back when I returned to the keyboard.

Treat each scene like a short story. It’s funny: I don’t need huge blocks of time to work on essays or stories. But the novel is a different creature. “OH MY GOD THIS BOOK IS KILLING ME,” seems to be the novelist’s mantra. Why do we writers psych ourselves out so much? Our own blog mama, Therese Walsh, suggested that if I found myself freaking out over the amount of work I had to do, I should try taking it one scene at a time and telling myself that scene is a story.

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The Art of Learning One’s Art: Class & Critique

By Tracy Hahn-Burkett / November 3, 2013 /

Once upon a few decades ago, I was a ballet dancer. I wasn’t a ballerina in the true sense of the word. I wasn’t a full member of a company. But I was an apprentice to a professional company for a couple of years. I got paid when I performed, I rehearsed with the company, and I took class with the company dancers at every opportunity before beginning my two or three advanced student classes each day.

Every day began the same way for every dancer associated with the company, from the most accomplished principal dancer at the pinnacle of his career to the newest, bottom-of-the-rung apprentice: we stretched our muscles on our own, and then we took a class.

What was the point of this daily commencement? To warm up our bodies for the day’s work, yes. But we also took class to learn. All of us hoped that in that first class of the day, we would receive corrections from the teacher. We sought corrections on body placement at the barre and hoped for critique of our performances of quickly memorized combinations “in the center.”

No one was above this treatment. Sometimes there might be a principal dancer who preferred to warm up before a performance on her own. Always people disliked some teachers and preferred others. But everyone, even the most seasoned dancers, recognized the value of studying with someone he or she respected. Everyone understood the ongoing value of receiving technical and artistic critique—of taking class.

Do you see where this is going?

I’ve heard examples lately of writers who express lack of interest or even disdain for classes and critiques. The reasons for this vary,

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Revision: The Ripple Effect

By Tracy Hahn-Burkett / August 25, 2013 /

Photo courtesy DeviantART.com’s ~KateAnnexTerrasochi

Earlier this year, I began a new draft of my novel. I’m still working primarily at the story level–focusing on plot problems, character inconsistencies, etc. Some of these problems leave me feeling either like my muse and I have gone a couple of dozen rounds with gloves on, or like he’s left the building entirely. He was happy to help with the drafting, but he’s leaving the revision to me.

Not everything in this draft appeared so challenging at the outset, however. For instance, I’d workshopped an earlier version of the manuscript and everyone agreed that one of the secondary characters, H, was over-the-top and served as too much of a foil for one of the primary characters. The point was a good one. H’s role needed to be cut back and his character made less sinister.

I began by taking a couple of days to re-imagine H. He needed a new profession. He was no longer as devious as before, so what other personality changes would that alteration trigger? Would he also no longer be so domineering with regard to his family? I decided he would be, but in a quieter way. Where H had been a world-traveler before, now he was the opposite: an immigrant who rarely left the county where he’d settled. In fact, he’d grown distrustful of people who couldn’t stay in one place, including the primary character he eventually would oppose.

With H’s character redrawn, I began to rewrite my novel. The first section promised to be the easiest as it was in the best shape. Aside from a single new scene I needed to add, adjusting H was my biggest task. He’s a secondary character; how hard could the changes be?

I made one change. Then another. And another. Another.

I stopped writing and read the rest of the section. My breakfast began to churn in my stomach as a truth first peeked through the words on the page, then tore through the narrative until I couldn’t deny its presence: much of the tension in this section of the novel emanated from the conflict between H and the primary character in question.

I was so tempted to start revising again, to tell myself what I’d discovered wasn’t a big deal and I could write it away if I just dove back in. But I knew that would be a mistake. This adjustment to a minor character and his relationship to a primary character had revealed a potentially huge flaw in my novel, and I had to stop and ask myself hard, big-picture questions: Why is a secondary character responsible for so much of the tension in the early part of the novel? Should he actually be a primary character? Should this conflict between him and the current primary character have a starring role? The starring role? Is this the book I should be writing?

Answering these questions was painful, because I knew if the answer to any of them turned out to be yes, it could mean I’d spent hundreds of hours writing the wrong book. But I had to be honest with myself. I needed to understand whether my writing had just veered off course a bit or if, […]

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Discovering that the Biggest Obstacle to Completing My Story Was Me

By Tracy Hahn-Burkett / June 30, 2013 /

Image by Dee Parson (babyluigiman1) via deviantART.com

The psychiatrist and I sat in a cafe, my digital recording device propped up on the table between us. I held both a fork and a pen in my right hand, though I wasn’t much interested in the salmon on my plate. It had taken me a couple of years to find an expert in this secretive area who would agree to speak with me, and I was focused on noting down everything my interview subject said.

While trying to work through the problems in an early draft of my WIP, I’d been more than a little dismayed to discover I’d gotten a key personality aspect of one of my primary characters wrong. A person who did what this character does for a living wouldn’t react to the trauma I’d given him in some of the ways I’d written. I’d been appalled at my error–character is supposed to be my strength!–and ultimately ripped out an entire thread of the storyline after I realized how substantially this mistake rippled through the plot.

I began to repair the story the way I’d begun the initial building of it: with character. I dug deeper into this character’s psyche, asked him more questions, considered his life again, until I had a better idea of who he was, how he came to be that person and how he would react in any given situation–including the trauma that sets the plot in motion.

But after I found my answers, I wanted confirmation. For years, I’d searched for a psychiatrist who understood the minds of this particular category of people who harbor an intense aversion to talking about themselves. Then, one day, as I perused a trade publication for former spies (yes, there is such a thing), I found an article about a psychiatrist who seemed like a good prospect. I contacted him, and he agreed to meet with me.

I prepped my subject beforehand about my project. Over lunch, he confirmed that my new approach to my character was realistic. I was thrilled (okay, relieved), and we continued chatting about my book. The additional conversation was fine with me, because I had discarded at least three dozen attempts to cover the gap in my plot and at this point, I was considering entertaining suggestions from anyone I might encounter on the street.

“It could be great fun,” he said. “Your protagonist could go to [a specific, chaotic, war-torn country] where your other character is doing his own thing. There’s so much potential in that…”

Click, click.

I actually heard two clicks in my head. I smiled at my lunch partner and leaned back in my chair. I momentarily stopped listening, and I considered those clicks.

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After “The End” – The Epilogue

By Tracy Hahn-Burkett / October 30, 2012 /

Ah, the epilogue.  Tons of e-ink has been spilled about it.  Writers have tried to define it; agents have clashed over representing books that contain it.  Editors read epilogues with red pencils at the ready.  Readers approach epilogues like candy corn: they either love them or hate them, and their feelings about a book can be made or destroyed based on their feelings about the epilogue.

Wait.  None of that is true.

Everyone debates the prologue, but hardly anyone discusses its little sister, the epilogue.  After all, no one decides whether to buy or keep reading a book based on the merits of its epilogue.

But don’t let the lack of writerly angst surrounding the epilogue fool you.  The conclusion of your book contains the last taste you will leave in the mouth of your reader.  Think about the flavors of your book.  Which one do you want to linger on the reader’s tongue when the cover is finally closed?

In truth, most books can and probably should stop at the end of their stories, which means the author can stop at the end of the final chapter.  If the contents of your epilogue are really just dénouement, showing resolution after the climax, then that epilogue isn’t necessary.  Like the prologue, the epilogue should only be used with purpose, to add something of value to the book that exists outside of the main story.

Let’s take a look at how this can work.

*Note: Spoilers ahead.  I’ll limit these as best I can, but read with caution!*

Sometimes authors want to show–and readers want to know–what will happen to characters after the story’s conclusion.  This can be especially true when the ending is not an altogether happy one; readers want reassurance that the character or characters to whom they’ve bonded ended up all right somewhere down the road.  The author can show this in a short epilogue.

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Writing Through a Rough Patch of Life

By Tracy Hahn-Burkett / August 30, 2012 /

We all have them: times when life screams at us, “Pay attention to ME, dammit!  I don’t care if you have a book/story/column/career.  I’m going to throw a sharp object in your path and you’re going to run over it and BOOM!  The best you’ll be able to do is coast to a stop and try to regain your breath.  Moving forward won’t even be in the picture.  You won’t be able to focus on anything at all.”

Yeah, we’ve all been there.  Or we will be.

Without going into detail (a writerly taboo, I know), I’ve worked through four significant and simultaneous personal crises during the past two years.

Through them all, I kept my obligations.  I never stopped writing, of course.  I met all of my deadlines.  I fed the kids and got them where they needed to be.  All the cogs kept moving.

But where I needed inspiration and confidence–that’s where things got ugly.

I began a thorough revision of my character-driven WIP early in this period.  The revision chugged along fine for a brief time, but then I reached a point where I had to fix a key plot problem.  I was tempted to play around with other, less knotty parts of the manuscript, adding detail here and fixing dialogue there, but I knew none of that would mean anything until I resolved this critical plot dilemma.

So I tried to work out the solution.  I wrote out a possibility.  Didn’t like it.  Scrapped it.  Repeated the process.

Again.  And again.

I decided to look past the plot for the answer.  Everything’s about character for me, so I went back into my characters’ lives and asked them more questions.  I discovered I actually didn’t know them as well as I thought I did, so I got to know them better.  I scribbled notes in the notebook in my car, in the notebook on my nightstand, in the one in my purse, on my dive slate.  If you want to know what one of my main characters ate for breakfast on this date in 1992 and why, I can probably tell you.

But every time I came up with a plot possibility, I also came up with a reason I hated it, and I threw it away.

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Take Your Characters to Therapy

By Tracy Hahn-Burkett / February 19, 2012 /

“Every character should want something–even if it is only a glass of water.”  –Kurt Vonnegut

Vonnegut was right, of course.  But we need to know more than what our characters want.  To truly empathize with our characters, we need to know why they want the things they desire.

What makes our characters tick?  What limits our characters, and what pushes them forward?  How have they been hurt in the past, who has hurt them, and how will these injuries affect them going forward in their lives?  How will our characters’ pasts color their abilities to make the choices they face as they approach the climaxes of their stories?

People are endlessly fascinating puzzles; that’s why we can’t stop reading or writing about them.  As writers, we have multiple tools at our disposal to figure out these puzzles.  We’ve all lived through a certain amount of life experiences, and, presumably, we’ve all got some imagination (or we wouldn’t be writing fiction).  We’ve got friends, family, insatiable appetites for reading and–admit it–penchants for silent observation and eavesdropping.  We consult books and interview people who do what our characters do for a living so that we can better enter our characters’ heads and understand how they think and feel.

But there’s something else that can help us as we build our characters and pit them against the obstacles they encounter.  Psychology is an entire science devoted to understanding human behavior, and psychologists and psychotherapists can guide writers through unfamiliar pathways of the human mind.

The characters in my WIP, for example, suffer a deeply personal loss in a public tragedy.  Each character brings his or her own backstory to this event, and, as a result, it affects each of them differently.

At the outset of this project, I could imagine my characters’ reactions to this loss.  But never having gone through anything like this myself, I wanted to gain a deeper comprehension of what happens to people, both internally and externally, when they’re forced to cope with a trauma both public and personal.  So I turned to the experts.  I took my characters to therapy.

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Macro-Revision: Take It One Piece at a Time

By Tracy Hahn-Burkett / October 29, 2011 /

In my first “real job” out of college, I worked as a committee staffer for a United States senator who had just been elected to his first term in public office.  On my first day on the job, my hyper-caffeinated, immediate superior stood in front of me in our office space that was barely large enough to contain our desks and outlined my responsibilities.

“Here’s where we are.  It’s been four months since the Boss was elected.  I’m swamped.  Here’s all of the constituent mail on anything related to this committee’s jurisdiction.  The letters started coming in two days after the election.  We haven’t answered any of it.  It’s all yours.  It’s very important to the Boss that the mail not get behind.  He’s adamant about that; it’s your first priority.  Also, we haven’t filed anything in four months.  You need to set up a filing system.  Also, the Boss needs a briefing book for the committee meeting in two days.  Put that together for him.  Also, there’s a constituent group coming in tomorrow about this issue everyone hates.  You can take that meeting.  Oh, and you should have your own issue area.  Immigration.  That’s you.  There’s a bill coming up soon.  S. something.  Ask M___.  She’ll tell you about it, and you can write a memo for the Boss.  All set?”

It wasn’t like I had a choice.  I lied and said I was.  My boss left for a bunch of meetings and I immediately phoned one of my college friends.  “I’m in over my head,” I said, practically sobbing over the thousands of pieces of paper that surrounded me, demanding attention on issues ranging from abortion to guns, from federal court procedure to bankruptcy and constitutional law.  “I don’t know what the hell I’m doing.  I’ll be fired by Thursday!”

After my friend convinced me not to quit before my boss realized his mistake in hiring me, I called a counterpart I’d met who worked for another senator on the other side of the building.  She came over, armed with a model letter, lists of committee procedures and suggestions for how to manage a list of tasks she assured me would never shrink for as long as I held my job.

By the end of the day, I’d drafted a response to a single constituent letter.  One down, hundreds to go.

Fast-forward quite a few years, to the initial revision of my first novel.

When I began this macro-revision, I discovered a long list of problems to address: flat characters, fuzzy settings, an ending I wasn’t crazy about, too much exposition, dialogue that went on too long, an abundance of stage direction, repetitive scenes, an overbearing minor character and more.  The dozens of bullet points laid out on multiple pages detailing what I didn’t like about my novel were more than I could hold in my head at once, and the idea of fixing all of them was overwhelming.

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The Three Writing Tools I Can’t Live Without

By Tracy Hahn-Burkett / June 30, 2011 /

Being neurotic, obsessive creatures, we writers tend to develop attachments to certain tools of the trade.  These days, those tools often take the form of iWillWriteYourNovel software programs, tablet computers that cost two years’ salary (as if you received such a thing) but allow you to work on your book in the bathtub, or whatever invention comes closest to providing an uninterrupted, socially acceptable caffeine IV drip.

I won’t deny that I love my electronic toys and my caffeine, too.  But my three “must-have” writing tools don’t consume a byte among them, can all be had on the cheap and don’t keep me awake when I ought to be recharging my writing brain.  The common factor in all of these non-digital tools is that they allow me to capture bits of conversation with characters or snippets of scenes whenever and wherever they occur to me, before my porous brain has the chance to let my thoughts escape while I search for something on which to write them down.  And one of these tools even lets me work on my book in the bathtub.

My Favorite Tool: The Dive Slate

My dive slate, just before I transcribe my notes.

Divers take notes under water.

Think about that fact.  You know what that means, don’t you?  Divers have to have something to write on.  A paper notebook won’t get the job done.

Solution: the dive slate.

I keep an 8” x 10”, two-sided dive slate in my shower with a special pencil attached, purchased together for $10 at Scuba.com.  I’ve drafted blog posts, essay outlines and scenes for my novel on that slate.  So often, ideas that eluded me at the keyboard suddenly burst into my mind once I’ve stepped into the shower to forget about the day’s frustrations.  The dive slate enables me to preserve my thoughts before the process of shampooing, rinsing, toweling off and getting dressed washes those epiphanies away.  When the slate gets so crowded with barely legible script I can’t possibly fit anything else on it, it’s time to transcribe my notes.  I only keep about thirty or forty percent of what I’ve jotted down, but that filtering process serves an important function of its own.  Once I’ve sorted through all the notes, I wipe the slate clean and begin again.

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Preserving the Act of Discovery

By Tracy Hahn-Burkett / February 26, 2011 /

Day after day, the thing that keeps me coming back to the blank page is the chance that in the process of filling that page with words, I just might discover something new.  I might learn something I didn’t know about my characters or the world they inhabit, or maybe I’ll even uncover a hidden truth about me.  Caught up in the thrill of one of these “eureka” moments, I often want to climb atop my literary rooftop and shout my epiphany to the world.  But I’m learning that sometimes, for the sake of the reader, I need to keep my discoveries to myself.

For example: I set a scene in my WIP in a favorite park that in springtime is graced with an abundance of a certain fragrant, flowering tree.  I framed my characters’ actions with the trees’ blossoming branches and petals that drifted away on soft breezes.  Only later did I recall that in real life, those trees had been planted at that very location to symbolize friendship.  Aha!  My book is about a friendship!  I was so blown away by this coincidence that I began to sow those trees everywhere in my WIP.  My manuscript reeked of them.  Yikes; time to prune. 

My inclination to broadcast my discoveries also showed up in the form of a character trait.  As it turns out, one of my main characters is very protective of the people he loves.  He’s so protective, in fact, that he frequently makes decisions he views to be in their best interests without consulting them.  Naturally his decisions can cause considerable problems as their consequences unfold. 

I didn’t plan this trait in my character.  He simply acted in this manner time after time as I wrote, until I noticed the pattern.  When I realized what he was doing, I was pleased.  The overprotectiveness is a good trait: it flows naturally from this character’s backstory, it contributes to his motivation and it creates plenty of conflict.  I knew it was helping me to create a three-dimensional, relatable character.

But almost as soon as I identified this trait, another of my characters hurried to point it out to him: “You’re always making decisions for other people.  Why do you have to be so overprotective?”

Time to hit the DELETE key.

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Taming the Beast

By Tracy Hahn-Burkett / October 30, 2010 /

Halloween comes tomorrow, but I’m not scared.  I met my big fright for the year this summer, when I confronted The Beast.

The Beast was—is—the first draft of my literary/mainstream WIP.  Working without an outline, I researched and wrote the manuscript over a period of three years, my passionate belief in my story and characters sustaining me past all the trap doors I encountered along the way.  After typing “The End,” I dutifully tucked my flash drive into a drawer.  Three months later, I printed the pages and read them.

I had expected the draft to be a mess, but to my horror, it revealed itself to be a Beast—a fat, hulking Beast, with matted fur the colors of a bruise, jagged fangs and extra limbs that poked out from random places on its body.  It was a bloated, reeking behemoth, and it bore no resemblance to what I’d set out to create.

The worst part was that one of my two primary characters simply didn’t work.  She needed to carry the narrative from beginning to end, and she was flat.  She had as much appeal as a rote recitation of the name of every beast that has ever inhabited the earth’s animal kingdom, from amoeba to zebra, and everything that’s ever lived in between.

By the time I finished reading The Beast, it had crushed me.  Weeks later, when I finally managed to crawl to my computer, gasping for breath, The Beast refused to let me write.  It deposited a nasty little anti-muse on my shoulder, one that hissed and spit epithets into my ear when I tried to think of ways to redraw my character.  “She sucks because you can’t write,” it said.  “You are a fraud, a joke.  You are only playing at what real writers do.”

And I believed it.

I could see this character in my head so well.  I understood her.  I knew her motivations, empathized with her longings and felt her frustrations at being unable to attain her objectives.  Why hadn’t this come through in the draft?  Who could help me fix her so that others could perceive her as clearly as I could?

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Interviews, or Going the Extra Mile to Research Your Novel

By Tracy Hahn-Burkett / May 30, 2010 /

Our guest poster today is Tracy Hahn-Burkett.  Tracy was a finalist in our search for our unpubbed contributor.  We loved her humor and solid advice for writers.  Tracy’s impressive bio includes being a congressional staffer, a U.S. Department of Justice lawyer and a public policy advocate for civil rights, civil liberties and public education.   Her blog UnchartedParent, is a fantastic community for adoptive parents and those trying to muddle through parenting (which is basically everyone who has kids!). 

Please enjoy today’s guest post by Tracy Hahn-Burkett.

What could induce an otherwise sane woman to hop into a white van 500 miles from home with a man she’d never met, then allow herself to be driven forty-five minutes to an anonymous country club to dine with people who refused to reveal their last names?

The desire to write a novel, naturally.  The woman was me, and I was doing research for my WIP.

I knew from the moment I began work on my novel that I would need to conduct interviews to truly understand my characters.  Some of them are intelligence officers leading secretive, duplicitous lives, and they also suffer wrenching personal losses that cut to the core of who they are.  I read thousands of pages of books, articles and internet documents, and the knowledge I gained from those sources was invaluable.  But it wasn’t enough.  I needed to get inside my characters’ heads; I needed to feel what they feel.  I needed to talk to people.

But how does the unknown, unpublished author reach out to experts and survivors of tragedies and convince them to give her some of their valuable time to enrich her fictional world? 

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