You Ever Hear A New Song And Immediately Go “oooh The Fake Scenarios In My Head Are Gonna Love This”

did it hurt? when the little people inside your head refused to follow your carefully-plotted novel outline?

I fucking love repetitive lines that change meaning over a piece of writing yes slay

making a collection

For old times sake is actually such a heartbreaking and beautiful sentiment. Like, let’s do it for the love that used to be here. It is reason enough.

I have feelings for you. The feelings are envy, malice, hatred, crush kill bite claw claw claw

Actually, can we talk about how Garbage a lot of ubiquitous writing advice in the late 2000's was?

Like "you have to begin in the middle of the action! your first line has to be a 'hook' that draws the reader further into the story!"

This is the bullshit responsible for the amount of books that begin in the middle of some sort of pointless fucking action scene that I care nothing about because I just got here.

Like I guess this makes books easier to "sell" or whatever on some level of the process, but it's garbage storytelling advice because setup and establishment of the Way Things Are is almost always necessary.

On some level I don't think it's actually possible to begin a story right on top of the "inciting incident" because...you don't have the raw materials to "incite" anything with. If you have to set up basic things about the characters and world after the "inciting incident," it's not really the inciting incident anymore, is it?

The event that "launches" a character into their plot line is something that follows from the character's established situation, desires, traits etc. It's a follow-up to a situation that makes a Story of some kind inevitable.

It is, by definition, an event that makes no sense and does not matter to the reader at all unless the "setup" already exists.

If you try to begin right in the middle of the event that "sparks" the plot, you're going to end up including a second, "real" event that actually does the job, because you can't do the job if the character, the stakes, the rules, etc. are not there yet.

Now the action scene you stuck to the beginning of your story is probably dead weight that is getting in the way of the setup.

nah man i cant come over tomorrow im gonna listen to songs and think about characters. yeah no its gonna be all day

brain: we’re gonna write a scene while sleeping :)

me: we’re going to remember it in the morning, right?

brain: :)

me: right?

yeah, this is my pet knight, she's a rescue. i gave her a brief act of mercy and she followed me home and sat outside my door to guard me from intruders. she swore her undying allegiance to me in exchange for a gift of grace and now she sleeps at the foot of my bed and weeps when im late coming home. and yeah, she only eats wet food because she's a snob, also.