Writing Tip

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.

yep a boyfriend sounds nice but a supreme enemy you make out with in secret sounds a lot more hardcore

loved being like 12 years old and making an OC and saying “yeah they’re a hardened criminal. they’re deeply involved in crime. they’re in a gang” and then never elaborating on that because i didn’t know how crime worked. this is still my approach

attempted murder is a form of intimacy by the way . don't listen to people who tell you different

One of my favorite tropes is character with a nasty toxic personality who tries very hard to do the right thing anyway

my art may never be as good as i want it to be, but i have hands and a pencil and i will make that everyone else’s problem

‘unreliable narrator’ but it’s ’narrator is deeply in love with the person they are narrating’

gay sex will not fix this situation. honestly, it'd probably make it worse. that being said i think we should give it a shot anyway