On how to ruin a tale p1

It is the simplest thing. Have it to be devoid of anything going on.

A LIST OF EVENTS
 
Sarah Domet (90 days to your plot) quotes Flannery O’Connor, fiction writer, to exemplify it.

“If nothing happens, it’s not a story.”

Flannery O’Connor

[Domet might add that if something’s not happening to someone, it is not a story]

That sounds simple and yes, easy to do. Truth is, we’re taught to make bullet lists at school or lists preceded by those hard to read numbers. Roman numbers I think they’re called. A long sigh. So the first thing we do is make a list of events to happen.

Yep. We can have them to fall in love at first sight, have intercourse, becoming pregnant, shotgun wedding… Yet, this is NOT something happening. It is not even a wedding speech, the least a story. The most drunken groom’s friend could make it hotter than this. The important thing is not it happening. Or it happening to someone.

PURPOSE

The thing of the utmost importance is the reason. The purpose. We like thinking things happen for a reason. And that’s a given even for Asian narratives. The stars align, the heavens decide, it opens the wheel of reincarnation… Just for it to be causally and not casually. Apparently cause and effect doesn’t exist in Asian narratives but it does, maybe in the ritual sense. We might fail in seeing the cause since we’re westerners and want everything explained but if such were the case; red string plots wouldn’t exist at all.

Can you speak in a Christian tongue miss[1] Merriam? Right, sometimes even myself I don’t get what I intend to say but what I’m trying to explain is….

TO BE CONTINUED

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[1] Oh yes, I’m unwed and a proud bachelorette. Viva la asexualite!