## Chapter 21

1 Ideally, any confrontation between characters should play out as a sort of stylized chess game, with the writer playing both sides. One side makes a move—Mara sealing the door—and then the other side makes a countermove—Luke searching for and finding the power outlet.

Also ideally, the side that wins a particular round does so out of cleverness, and the side that loses does so not so much out of stupidity but because they missed something. Here, there’s a little fact about Luke that Mara and Karrde either didn’t know or, in the rush of the moment, didn’t think all the way through.

Just as the heroism of your hero is measured against the villainy of your villain, so too is the hero’s cleverness measured against that of his opponents.

—TZ