Cat Fight In The Kitchen-Wattpad Rant

How Not to be Boring (continued)

I meant to post this analysis last night, but you’ll never guess who showed up at my work yesterday…wait for it…MY BEST FRIEND!!! He wasn’t supposed to come back for another month and a half, but he just threw all his plans out the window and drove eight hours to come see me on my one week off! I’m literally walking on sunshine. I’m so happy. I just...can't even form cohesive thoughts!! Everyone gets a hug and a high five!

But, I have to get this up or else that last chapter probably won’t help people so here is How Not to be Boring (continued)

There are two reasons I chose to use a personal experience and not just a chapter from one of the things I have posted on my profile:

1. The stuff I have posted on my profile isn’t so good. (I'm not fishing for comments. I purposely have only first drafts, and they are never good). (This wasn’t even that good, (first draft thing again) but I already had it written and we all know how lazy I am)

And

2. It’s a lot easier to discuss literary techniques in nonfiction (believe it or not). You guys were almost guaranteed to feel something when I told you it was real, which actually helps my point.

That being said, everything I say here applies to fiction. Where I say "me" or "I", imagine your character.

I could have just told you that I was heartbroken, because that’s what this entire piece was about. I was incredibly, undeniably heartbroken. But if I just told you that, you wouldn’t have felt anything, except for “oh, I’m sorry, Addy.”

So I gave you a picture. Obviously my heart was shattered. Someone that reads so much into the symbolism of inanimate objects that she ultimately takes off on a four hour ride where she just tears herself apart with thoughts of the guy she misses and how badly she wants him to need her is obviously heartbroken.

You saw literally everything that happened in my mind.

Hopefully you could smell the sweat and cigarette smoke. Hopefully you could feel yourself laying on this mattress that has indents of someone that’s long since gone away. Maybe you even felt a choking hug and tasted whiskey and salt or even started to smell bitter coffee.

And maybe you kind of had a picture of my best friend in your mind. Maybe you could see his blue eyes and the scar in his eyebrow. And maybe you saw me grabbing at my hair and hitting the steering wheel in frustration outside a McDonalds. (Yeah, I made a major life decision outside a McDonalds. That should tell you how sad I was).

I hope you guys saw everything.

Telling you that I was upset wasn’t good enough, because the fact is, it wasn’t just that I was upset. It was that I started to picture him. I was so lonely, I literally started dreaming up the multiple facets of an imaginary conversation between the two of us. And each time, I wanted him to accept me.

You might have even noticed the whole show and tell contrast (because I’m a big proponent of the fact that telling is boring, but showing way too much can be just as bad). I told what he would be thinking and then showed how I would know when he set his jaw and balled up his hands.

(Again this is far from a good example of how not to be boring, but I work with what I already have).

But I think the biggest part of the entire piece was that you didn’t really know what set me off until the phone call. You didn’t realize that everything was falling apart because I had just screwed my knee all to hell (unless you follow me, in which case I posted a message about it). It was kind of a little twist. You knew I missed him, but you had no idea that I got set off by an injury. And at that point, things should have started making sense. It wasn’t just because he was gone, but because something in my life had changed.

The knee injury was the inciting incident.

And you learned a lot in the things I didn’t say during the phone call. I didn’t tell him how badly I felt about myself. I didn’t tell him that I almost drove all the way to the city to see him. I didn’t tell him how I felt like a coward or how I felt like I couldn’t do anything right.

In fact, I wasn’t even telling the readers. Everything in italics was in my head. You were literally reading my thoughts. It wasn’t that you were the reader and I was the character. It was that you were in my head.

And if you felt everything, if I did it right, you should have been in the scene. You should have been sitting on the couch watching me rock back in forth in his chair, or sitting on the dresser watching me run my hands over the mattress.

You should have been sitting in the passenger’s seat of my car listening to me have this rhetorical conversation that ultimately made me pull my car into a McDonald’s parking lot and change my mind.

You should have seen me go through the day, so numb that no one suspected anything had happened the night before.

And when he called, you should have slipped into my head.

If I did everything right, that should have been the point where you stopped being a reader and started being a character. If I were a good writer, that would have been the moment when it wasn’t me crying on the floor when he told me he was proud of me. It should have been us.

And when it was over, I hope you pulled out of the scene and felt like you left a little piece of yourself with me on the floor. Because when an author writes something that’s not boring, for a moment, it’s a part of you, and when it’s over you have no choice but to leave that part behind.

So, if I did this right, this shouldn’t have been boring. You should have been there with me.