There is a site where comic creators put forward their 10 rules (commandments?) for making comics, titled the 10 rules for drawing comics. I particularly like this quote by Dean Haspiel:

That’s what I’m doing now. Making one big red mess. Because life IS chaos, and stuff usually happens randomly. Of course you can chart some kind of cause and effect in retrospect, or subscribe to a new age approach of Everything Happens For A Reason. But really, life is a melting pot of people doing stuff and occasionally bouncing off of one another. In story, characters make choices and that’s what drives narrative, but in life, it is often the case that shit happens and people have to deal with it. And sometimes, their solutions to the shit creates shit for other people. Paying the shit forward- that’s the kind of storytelling I like.

So, thanks Dean. Always a pleasure to cherry-pick the quotes that suit my particular working ontology, and discard the rest.