Boy Meets Girl

        Boy meets girl.

        Problem: how do they meet? How do you handle the introduction scene?

        Well, that's over to you. Do it your way, if you really want to. However, there's no necessity, unless you're bent on writing a boy-meets-girl story.

        You can just as easily start here:-

        Boy has met girl and it's their twenty-fifty date (one of them has been keeping track of the arithmetic, but the other has not ... and why is this, you might ask?)

        Or here:-

        Boy (or girl) is at the wheel of the car, and the sirens are approaching, and is the person beside him still breathing?

        Or here:-

        Boy and girl, having met and married and then divorced and then remarried again are wondering whether remarriage was a mistake and whether they should get divorced again.

        Two points:-

        (i) If the story is about the car crash, or the infidelity, or the earthquake, or the divorce, or the mother in law, then why worry about the boy meets girl part? Maybe you can just cut it.

        (ii) If you can't figure out how to handle something, then just leave it out. For example, your story requires boy to meet girl at a party, but you can't figure out how to do this. So you show boy (or girl) heading off to the party and then show the same person after the party.

        Questioner: "So how did it go?"

        Protagonist: "Not bad ...."

        Half an hour later, Protagonist was asleep in his / her bed, dreaming of the boy / girl that he / she had met at the party. When he / she woke up in the morning, the phone was ringing.

        He / she answered the phone.

        "I'm going to be stuck in Toronto for another two days."

        Toronto. What country was that? Mexico? No ... Mexico wasn't the answer.