Bedtime Stories at the Truman household

"Can I have a bedtime story?"

"Sure; what should it be about?"

"A spider and, uh, toast!"

"A spider and toast. Okay, so once upon a time there was a spider and some toast. Yeah. What do they do?"

"Erm, they have a tea party!"

"A tea party. The spider and the toast have a tea party. And what do they do at the tea party?"

"They eat toast!"

"Right. At the tea party the spider eats the toast. Congratulations; you've killed off one of the main characters in the first two sentences of the story. This is a tragedy of Shakespearean proportions, and by 'Shakespearean' I mean Titus Andronicus."

"[guffawing]"

"So now what? The toast was going to be the main character."

"No, the spider is the main character! What happens to the spider?"

"He dies. Of dehydration."

"What??"

"He just ate a piece of very dry toast that was literally hundreds of times his own size. There, now we've killed off both main characters in less than a page. Presumably the rest of the book is a treatise on economics or something."

"Economics? Whaaaat?"

"Yeah; the author just titled it The Spider and the Toast to lure readers in, but within the first page he killed off the main characters and awkwardly segued into an economics textbook. The end."

"Hooray! Goodnight!"

"Goodnight."