Chekov

[Anonymous No.22637463]

"If theres a gun in the first act, it must go off later in the play"

Is this true or literal bullshit?
I mean if there is a beautiful butt in my book does this mean it needs to fart?

[Anonymous No.22637468]

>>22637463
Yes, the butt must indeed do something if you mention it.
(verification not required)

[Anonymous No.22637471]

no, he was very specifically talking about guns. it doesn't work with anything else

[Anonymous No.22637500]

>>22637468
>if you mention it

This, basically. The entire point of Chekov's Gun is that you do not want to waste the audience's time with pointless information. Therefore, any information you include must in some way be relevant to the overall plot.

Ergo, if you are going to bother mentioning that there is a gun involved in your story, that gun had better be put to use later on in the story or you've just wasted our time with pointless information.

The evil twin of Chekov's Gun is the Shaggy Dog Story, a long sequence of details that ultimately has no point and no relevance to the plot. Shaggy Dog Stories are hated.

[Anonymous No.22637508]

>>22637500
Watch this post get misinterpreted

[Anonymous No.22637532]

I've found that it's a good principle to keep in mind when writing stories. It's not just about cutting things; it also encourages you to make connections between all the random details you threw down on the page in your first draft. It helps make things feel really tightly and organically knitted together, or like a nicely whirring machine.

If you want to read more about this, I recommend George Saunders's book A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, where he analyses stories by Chekhov and other Russian authors from a creative-writing-workshop kind of perspective. He has a version of Chekhov's gun he calls the Ruthless Efficiency Principle.

[Anonymous No.22637533]

>>22637463
>>22637500
Refuted by Ulillillia.

[Anonymous No.22637543]

>>22637533
No way someone with that name refutes anything
(verification not required)

[Anonymous No.22637551]

>stories shouldn't be full of needless extra bullshit
And the people voluntarily going on the literature board have to unironically ask what he meant by this

[Anonymous No.22637576]

>>22637551
The number one thing that I aggressively hate about books is how they're full of pointless shit. It does not create extra depth.
I dont want to know what kind of rug the main character has on their floor
I cant believe famous writers do this "maximalism" shit too.

[Anonymous No.22637596]

>>22637543
I've read the book too, it's an interesting bit of outsider literature structured like a video game. The writer Ulillillia is autistic, and his writing definitely reflects that. Effectively, you can put as much detail into something as you'd like, but the details don't have to imply anything down the line. We learn a ton of biographical details of the characters in the story, but that never comes into play as the story progresses. It helps with the worldbuilding and the mental imagery, but it isn't called upon later to move the plot forward

[Anonymous No.22637618]

>>22637596
I don't think he's actually autistic. He has next level OCD.

[Anonymous No.22637622]

>>22637576
That's kind of what writing is, though. It's the journey, dude, not the destination.

It's like transferring your consciousness into this other weird form for the span of 300 pages, which includes experiencing rugs, and the specific way in which that text-consciousness experiences rugs.

If you're listening to a song, you don't turn it off the first time the chorus repeats; you realise you're there for the experience, not just extract the note information.

If you're hanging out with a friend, you don't constantly say, 'Let's cut the banter and get down to the key items on our agenda.' And having a business meeting is to hanging out with a friend as reading a Wikipedia plot synopsis is to reading a book.

[Anonymous No.22637623]

>>22637596
Interesting but since you mentioned his autism, that sounds like a small spergout. lol.

[Anonymous No.22637629]

>>22637622
I wrote a 200-page novel and there's nothing useless in it. Everything is tied to something important to the story. I dont want to waste the reader's time in a time where we watch 5-second tiktok videos and feel they werent fast-paced enough.

[Anonymous No.22637640]

>>22637618
>He has next level OCD
That's possible, but he talks about it as autism a lot. He has a documentary on him, which is really good (just skip the boring chunk about the Minot flood in the middle of it)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QFLJEIrfx9U

>>22637623
He's just very organized, kind of like a Mirror Universe Chris Chan. Instead of investing all his energy into chasing ass, playing video games and creating a derivative comic based on his life experience, Ulillillia invests all his energy into creating utterly original works

[Anonymous No.22637644]

>>22637640
Never mind, I just deboonked my post, it is OCD.

[Anonymous No.22637660]

>>22637629
I do generally agree with the principle, as I was trying to get at here >>22637532. But I think there is value in less rigorous writing too. Maybe it's just a difference in styles.

[Anonymous No.22637687]

>>22637533
I want thecatamites to review this book. He's the only guy with a solid sense for the aesthetic potential of internet outside art. E.g.:

>THE SUPERNATURAL OLYMPICS - Every game is potentially a container-game. Ulillillia’s most well-known work may still be his video series on Bubsy 3D, in which he converts it from a list of goals or authored challenges into a collection of “oddities” - what’s the highest point on the map? What’s the fastest speed Bubsy can reach? Posted a few years before even the first GDQ event, these were my and possibly other people’s first exposure to the same kind of against-the-grain method of play as speedruns and the pannenkoek2012 Mario 64 Half-A-Press explainer. But what stood out most at the time was the perversity of applying this kind of close read to Bubsy 3D, of all things - a game that played a similar role in the emerging game design canon as Satan did in christian mythology. If even Bubsy levels could be transfigured into gardens of delights, what couldn’t? And what would game design mean if this were the case?

>In the best shareware tradition, Ulillillia’s own “The Supernatural Olympics” takes these questions and turns them into a floaty platform game. Platform here is singular - the whole game consists of running and jumping around a single vast, unbroken plane, while a densely layered background panorama rolls by in the distance. There are some nominal, optional goals, to do with getting to a particular speed or height… But mostly it’s about the sensual pleasures of movement tech and of abstracted, virtual space, of space with the giddy unboundedness of math. What if I told you that you could keep multiplying figures together to get ever higher values – and still never leave the domain of real numbers?! Unlimited hours of gameplay, and a form of desire which has been with the medium since inception.

>The test level never has to end – from within the shareware ruins, The Supernatural Olympics projects forth a strangely Apollonian aesthetic of clarity, lightness, space.

[Anonymous No.22637762]

>>22637618
Its Autism: Classique. Not any of this neurodivergent stuff, just straight up a sperg.

[Anonymous No.22638282]

>>22637463
This advice is only about plays. In a play you have very limited time, limited budget, limited capacity to catch details for your audience who will likely only see this once.
In a book, you can afford to include things that won't immediately be directly plot-essential. Don't be a bore, don't muddy the narrative unnecessarily, but don't feel the need to slavishly and formally "pay off" every single detail just because you mentioned it earlier.

[Anonymous No.22639784]

>>22637463
It's not literally true. It's just his approach to writing.

[Anonymous No.22639897]

>>22637463
>>22637500
It's not that the gun necessarily needs to go off or the butt needs to fart, but they need to serve a purpose.
The gun could later become incriminating evidence, and the lady bottoms could have seduced the protagonist.
Each element of your story should serve a purpose.

[Anonymous No.22639904]

>>22637463
It means don't bring up irrelevant shit just to pad the page, don't count the words, make the words count, etc.

[Anonymous No.22640087]

>>22637463
It means be selective in the details you choose to include. Don't mention something if it doesn't add to the story.

[Anonymous No.22640368]

>>22637463
Poe took a huge shite on this and wrote a story which a traditional, poetry and a philosophical essay at the same time.

[Anonymous No.22640533]

Yeah.
Even me, a liker of subversive tropes, I felt anger at that star in The neuromancer
So don’t do it, or if you don’t do it well