The greatest mistake Gossip Girl ever made was revealing that Dan Humphrey had been the anonymous writer behind the blog all along. All good stories have an engine, and that’s what Gossip Girl forgot. The reductive way to understand a story engine is to conflate it with plot. You have to set up dominoes, writing teachers say, in order to knock them down. But you can set up a line of dominoes that falls perfectly in a straight line and doesn’t make anyone feel anything at all. You can set them up poorly, the edge of one barely clipping the edge of another, and they will fall, sure. But to what
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