Cat Fight In The Kitchen-Wattpad Rant

Fast Paced Stories

Let’s not ever be as angry as I was in that last rant, okay? Cool. Thanks.

Anyway, I haven’t necessarily been avoiding Wattpad, I’ve just been pretty busy lately. And I was really pissed.

But last weekend was fantastic.

Too bad we’re not here to talk about that. The only reason I’m here is because I just realized that my best friend gave up a career as a professional athlete to be a professional musician and I have quite literally never done anything great with my life…nothing.

You’d think I’d be some interesting, cool person to be so close to someone that awesome. Long story short, I’m not.

All I do is rant.

So let’s rant about: Fast Paced Stories

Have you ever read one of those stories where chapter one is the first day of school and the MC meets this really cute new boy and by chapter four they’re a couple and they are deeply, desperately in love? Then, for the next thirty chapters they’re all happy and sunshiny and maybe they get in one fight, but it’s pretty much just an obnoxious outpouring of PDA?

And the whole story takes place over a month if you’re lucky.

Does this seriously happen? I mean, honestly. Have any of you ever met someone and fallen madly in love with them in a week? (And this is a site full of people that are stuck on the idea of love-at-first-sight and having to have a significant other, so I fully expect at least a few yeses).

Don’t get me wrong. I know I move terribly slowly in relationships (try sixteen years, and he had to make the first move). I’m not saying every story has to play out over an entire lifetime, but it would be nice if there was a realistic pace.

Can you honestly say you love someone after a month? I can’t. (Actually, I don’t ever tell anyone I seriously love them. It’s always the generic “I love you” in the most painfully platonic way).

But c’mon. Not everything can happen overnight.

There are these things called time gaps. If you’re going to write a love story where the characters meet in chapter one, then you should probably learn to utilize a time gap.

No one wants to read an entire life story. They want to hit the highlights.

Lemme give you an example. Okay, so I spend a few hours in the hospital twice a week (used to be four times a week, but I’m awesome (not really, but work with me)) and I have to sit there with all these old people that think I’m interested in hearing their life story.

So for quite literally the last six months I’ve been hearing these old women’s lives. And don’t get me wrong, I like these women. They’re smart and sassy and funny and just all around nice. But good goddamn, can they talk.

They’re all within the age ranges of sixty to eighty and after six months, and so many hours, we’re only in the twentieth to fortieth years of their life. And they talk the whole entire time.

Do you know how bored I get? It’s bad.

Yes, they have interesting stories, but the interest is buried in all the bullshit I don’t need to know.

And since my best friend has been going with me for the last week (bless his heart…it makes him miserable, but he refuses to leave me there since he feels guilty), they have to catch him up.

It’s been a really long six months, kids.

But while they’re been trying to fill him in on their life stories so they can catch him up to speed (because they refuse to acknowledge the fact that he’s leaving next week and doesn’t need catching up), they’ve been skipping over parts.

And I’ve decided that if they had skipped parts in the first place, I would have enjoyed these autobiographies so much more.

Because they only hit on the important times. They only capture the moments that changed their life.

The time they met their first love. The first time they met their husbands. Some of them talked about the first time they held their newborn baby. Others talked about their first divorce. Some talked about when their parents or family members or children or husbands died.

The point is, they touched on the topics that made a difference to them. They only shared the things that shaped them into who they are.

And none of these points came within weeks. It’s taking so long to tell these stories, because they happened over a long time. You can’t meet a guy, get engaged that night, marry him the next week, and have a baby a month later and live happily ever after.

No. Just no.

You don’t get to eighty by rushing through everything.

So, here’s the gist of this little rant here (because I feel like this was all over the place):

1. Only hit on the important events of a story (use fluff to hide details (think foreshadowing)).

And

2.  Realize that life usually takes a break between major moments. Use time gaps. Don’t rush things too much.

The greatest stories carve a place in society by taking a piece of time.

Boom. There. Was that good? Yeah. No. Maybe. Probably not. I’m just glad it wasn’t angry.

Wanna hear a funny story? (I feel obligated to tell them now since no one likes a pissy Addy).

The old ladies really like my best friend and they tease him all the time about how they're cougars (they really are too). And they decided to get him a card for coming to see them all the time. Anyway, so he hasn’t gotten it yet, but they were all signing it the other day while he was distracted and I was reading some of their little comments.

One lady, she’s eighty-six and four feet eight inches of sass, wrote in her shaky cursive “You kids and your sexting. Call mama Bonnie.” And she left her phone number. I’m not sure what she was insinuating or where she even heard the word, but she very clearly wrote “sexting”. Bless her perverted heart.

And another wrote “I would have liked you more if you took your shirt off.”

I really do like these ladies.