Dan and I bought a thing called “long ziti” from the local Weird Bargain Store, largely as a joke, but…. I have never had a more unsettling pasta experience in my life. They wouldn’t bend enough to cook from top to bottom simultaneously, and while they were cooking boiling water kept spouting out from the tops of them out of the pot, like a boiling pipe organ.
Then they were so long and floppy and hoselike that we couldn’t pick them up with anything other than tongs, and then they were so long and unwieldy that it was basically impossible to sauce them without them all slithering out of the bowl like wet snakes. They then proceeded to cool down almost completely within the the seconds it took to walk to the living room.
Eating them was like eating a bowl full half melted drinking straws.
Bringing back Long Ziti for another round because it’s just too funny
there’s going to be a difference sometimes between the stories that you find masterfully crafted and the stories that mean a lot to you personally and those two things don’t have to overlap completely or even at all to make that story worthwhile
and that’s a good thing to remember as a reader/viewer/etc but also as a writer because even if whatever you ultimately write is full of mistakes, someone out there is gonna take it so to heart that it fundamentally changes them as a person. and that is. Huge.
Like! I made a list of the top ten stories that have influenced me as a human being and only 2 or maybe 3 of them are things I would hold up as examples of narrative mastery. But I cannot imagine who I would be without the other 7!!
Please write your story and share it with the world! Someday someone will not be able to imagine a world without your story in it and they’ll be so grateful you brought that wonderful, meaningful thing into their life
Also while I’m on a roll, a story doesn’t have to have some deep hidden meaning or philosophical theme for it to be meaningful. Sometimes a story is meaningful to someone because it was fun and made them happy at a time when they really, really needed that. Or because it was an incredibly intriguing world that inspired them to dream. Maybe they’re another writer, and they see in that thing you wrote the exact kind of story they want to tell someday.
And Sometimes a Potato 