This is sort of emblematic of what's driving me nuts about these videos. Here's eight minutes. The first minute and a half are needless. All they do is cue up a cute symmetry with the ending line about opening lines. But the video isn't about opening lines, it's about metafiction. But then it isn't offering any advice about metafiction or how to incorporate that into your story. Instead, it's mostly just a highlight reel of how metafiction functioned in the Dark Tower series, with special attention paid to King's role. And then the author's big takeaway is a broad encouragement for writers to just get started on writing. I'm sorry, I thought we were here to "learn" something. Was that it? A Nike line? Are you serious?

How does the encouragement to "just get started" track with the central parallel? The author of the video points out the "unstuck-in-time" quality of Roland's chase with the Man in Black and compares it to the Road Runner and Wile Coyote. Given that analogy, are we Wile Coyote? Isn't then the implicit assumption that there's a degree of fatalism and tragedy to the "start" of Roland's quest? If so, why are you zigzagging from that to a cheery you-can-do-it easily-digestible slogan? How does that track with the previous six minutes?

It's a mess. It's an unclear mess. Like the Nerdwriter videos, this author compensates for the need to put out constant video by eliminating specificity and focus, by overemphasizing preamble.

That's actually been a useful tool lately. I'll watch these videos, wait for the video to reach its thesis, then study the video to see how long it took to reach the thesis, how they build up their argument for the thesis, and whether or not they even bothered to prove it (as opposed to seguing into a complementary argument and never going back). It's sobering and depressing.