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How do you introduce the reader/audience to a new setting and new people?
You start the story in the middle/after something big has already happened and set the main protagonist as someone who is discovering and learning about the world with you.
(examples of this: Star Wars, The Hobbit, LOTR, Apocalypse Now, to name just a few non-zombie related movies. Books do it too! Most fantasy/sci-fi books I've read do that for sure. But also books like The Road, The Beach, Oryx & Crake, The Raw Shark Texts, even Dante's Divine Comedy starts this way!)
I imagine there would be a LOT more complaining if the plot began with everything okay, patient zero, describing every step of the infection process, etc.
1: it demystifies the whole zombie apocalypse. Resident Evil pissed me off because it felt it needed to spoon-feed me all the facts. "zombies exist because so and so was doing this to those people to discover a cure so that, etc." I don;t know about you, but I like to think about and analyze things for myself.
2: being so specific lends itself to trying to rationalize and explain yourself over and over and you get trapped as a writer into explaining "well this is why there are zombies" and because you describe that, you now have to rationalize "this is how it spreads in a scientific tangible sense." and on and on and although it may be fascinating to some, it doesn't make a good story.
There's more, but the bottom line is, good storytelling doesn't have to be FRESH AND ORIGINAL all the time. Conventions exist for a reason. THEY WORK. I challenge you to come up with a story that is both interesting, engaging, and doesn't appear to derive itself from anything existing in literature or film.
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