Chapter 1 - Prologue (Commentary)

Hi there, and welcome to my first ever premium post! I have a number of plans for this new avenue, but I figured I’d start small. If you have an interest in the writing process behind “Sadie’s Mission”, these commentaries are for you.

Each week, I will write about my thoughts behind each chapter. I’ll discuss old ideas, backstories, and details that never made it into the published versions. Feel free to comment, ask questions, and all that :)

Without further ado, I present the commentary for the Prologue to Sadie’s Mission.

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Where better place to start writing than the prologue, huh? The concept for “Sadie’s Mission” came to me about a a week after I completed “Brianna Gets Bulky”. At the end of that story, the main character was phenomenally obese, critically out of shape, and essentially isolated from the world beyond her husband and feeder.

In beginning this new story, I felt I had to two things to achieve right off the bat. The first was a sense of place. “Brianna” lacked this until the final 20 chapters or so, given that most of the narrative took place in her apartment. Sure, it was set in real world locations, including San Diego, San Antonio, Tokyo, and Palermo, but it was very surface level. Heck, it was only in the final 5 chapters that Brianna’s apartment building is described.

The second element was acknowledging the story’s goal. “Brianna” was about a girl who went about her life and suddenly gained weight, falling into a certain lifestyle as she went. The main character in “Sadie”, on the other hand, is active in her goals and maintains a significant degree of agency within the story. Point being, she makes decisions, as occasionally poor as they may be. And here, she’s chosen her lifestyle, insofar as dipping cheeseburgers in butter constitutes a lifestyle.

And so, I wrote the prologue as an homage of sorts to the ending of “Brianna”. Swap Sadie with Brianna, put her in a house, and this is what you get. I envisioned this imaginary version of Sadie around the weight Brianna ended up at, around 415 pounds, highlighting my transition from one protagonist to another

Now let’s talk about the house. Was it possible to drill home the average-ness of the place and its neighborhood? I’m not so sure, but it was essential for character building.

As we see in later chapters, Sadie is exceptional in a number of ways. She’s athletic, she’s a runner, she’s destined for great things. And yet, in the context of the story, these environs drag her down to our level - the house and its privacy literally enabling her to kickstart her descent in the early chapters.

I’ll save more context for later commentaries, but suffice to say that the prologue answers two of the first questions a reader has: “Who?” and “Where?”. We’ll get to “What”, “When”, “Why”, and “How” later…