Once a long time ago a person I met online asked me to be his writing partner and we agreed we’d try to write a fantasy story about his character, a swordsman, and mine, an archer, trying to stop a giant monster from terrorising a kingdom.
He asked me to go first, so, thinking chronologically, I wrote a few thousands words about this monster tracking down a innocent pair of children and devouring them.
When I handed it over to him, he read it and laughed.
“What is this?” he said. “I thought we were writing about our characters attacking the monster!”
“It’s the set up,” I said. “You know, the inciting incident?”
He laughed again, bewildered, and that was the end of our partnership.
Lissa Bilyk 