41–50 of 181 posts
This principle kills surprises because a soon you see the rifle you know what will happen. A little bit of misleading is not a bad thing.
I've seen this principle come up a few times but I don't think I fully understand it. For example, assuming a passage in a story where a protagonist enters person X's house and a particular room is described in much detail. The described detail does not necessarily advance the story but instead does "character building" hinting at the personality of person X. There literally could be a loaded gun hanging on the wall…
The best stories frequently break the principle. There is a ton of worldbuilding done in even simple-reading stories like the Hobbit, that are largely irrelevant to the greater whole, but serve to give the reader a better perspective. Mindlessly following Chekhov's Gun, in my opinion, will always result in pulp fiction. Whether it's TV or novels, or movies. If you've stripped a story down to the bare basics, all you'…
In The Lord of the Rings there are hundreds of "guns" hanging at the wall, which are not directly involved in this three books' story. But the reader feels that they are not only decorations. And the reader could do some research on Tolkien's work to find out about their story and importance for the characters' backgrounds. That makes the magic I believe.
This principle kills surprises because a soon you see the rifle you know what will happen. A little bit of misleading is not a bad thing.
On the day they were going to kill him, Santiago Nasar got up at five-thirty in the morning to wait for the boat the bishop was coming on. He'd dreamed he was going through a grove of timber trees where a gentle drizzle was falling, and for an instant he was happy in his dream, but when he awoke he felt completely spattered with bird shit 'knowing what will happen' is not in itself a limit on good literature. You kno…
This principle kills surprises because a soon you see the rifle you know what will happen. A little bit of misleading is not a bad thing.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Sorry if I ruined anyone's weekend...
Nah, I just meant it as a humorous reference to the well-known cognitive blackhole properties of TV Tropes.
This principle kills surprises because a soon you see the rifle you know what will happen. A little bit of misleading is not a bad thing.
Surprise is overrated. Suspense is superior. The best explanation of the difference is given by Hitchcock in an interview with Truffaut. We see two characters talking for 45 seconds. Then a bomb goes off, that was under the table. The audience didn't know there was a bomb: big surprise; but the dialogue between the characters is completely irrelevant and eclipsed by the explosion. Now imagine the same scene, but befo…
I think a recent series which bucked this trend was For All Mankind. Rather than building suspense, bad stuff just happened with no warning. And it wasn’t a jump scare, it just happened. The entertainment for me then came from the characters reactions and how the plot then unfolded.
I actually class it as one of the best shows I’ve seen. I feel it managed to be very wholesome while also having some major emotional highs and lows. In particular, it didn’t build drama just for the sake of keeping the audience engaged.
I could talk about that show for ages.
When people reading these novels, most of them wouldn't think of those runaway characters because there are many new characters and exciting plots. But it just strikes when people start to recall the plots sometimes after reading: one of the most important characters already foresee all of the conflicts, and they just run away and live their life rather than participating in the following conflicts.
It turns out, most of the novels are written by frustrated scholar-officials. They got burnt out in reality so they wrote those novels. Many of them would become hermits and enjoyed their life happily after. It sounds escapist but there's some Zen in it in the context of Chinese literature.
It feels like "The Shawshank Redemption" when it strikes me that the hammer was in the bible, and the most intensive scene was presented in a very calm way when people didn't know it.