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Hi, Ben Greenberg,

I’m not familiar with your work, but this is the best advice I can think of: You can’t make up your story as you go along. You have to have a plot, real people, and a goal that you’re writing towards. Try telling your story aloud, making it more conversational, and more real, and then write it down the way you said it aloud. I don’t even understand what you’re saying when you talk about “poetic devices.” It sounds to me like you haven’t planned out the characters enough. And the story has to be ready before you write a single word. Make your people REAL, make their conversational NATURAL. 

And relax. If you work at it, and if you really want to do it, it will come.            —–Gordon Korman—–