Welcome back to Page Ninety. I am Lenore Castellanos. Last week we made our scenes shorter. This week we look at the person standing in the middle of them. Here is a note I wrote hundreds of times as a reader and never enjoyed writing. The protagonist is passive. They get fired, they get dumped, they get a phone call, and they react, and by page twenty the reader has quietly stopped caring. The fix is not a bigger goal. It is a smaller, more specific want. We will look at how Greta Gerwig does it in Lady Bird and how Tony Gilroy hides it in Michael Clayton, and then Tomas Reyes, who just sold a pilot, will walk us through rewriting a lead from scratch. There is an exercise at the end and it is one sentence long. You are listening on Witspeak Podcasts.