It’s a tough road to walk. Maybe the main difference between real life and stories is that with real life, things just exist for no reason, things happen for thematically incoherent reasons all the time, there’s just too much stuff happening all the time to weave it all into a single coherent narrative. With stories, every element of the story exists because the author decided to add it. The reason may not be essential to the central theme of of the story, but everything exists for some narrative-centric reason. Once you notice that economy of reality, you start thinking about why any particular element of a story was put in, and most of the time there’s a… if not good reason, then at least some reason for every tiny detail of a story. Some authors are careless with their details, but for the most part authors are very particular about what details they use.
Chekov’s Gun is another way of saying that, at least for stories, everything really does happen for a reason. Sometimes people over-generalize this principle from stories to life.
I wanna see more people randomly coughing or sneezing in movies/shows.
100% of the time, a cough or sneeze is Chekov’s Sick. It’s boring. I want some character to pause in the middle of a rant, cough, go back into their rant, and attention never to be brought to it.
It’s a tough road to walk. Maybe the main difference between real life and stories is that with real life, things just exist for no reason, things happen for thematically incoherent reasons all the time, there’s just too much stuff happening all the time to weave it all into a single coherent narrative. With stories, every element of the story exists because the author decided to add it. The reason may not be essential to the central theme of of the story, but everything exists for some narrative-centric reason. Once you notice that economy of reality, you start thinking about why any particular element of a story was put in, and most of the time there’s a… if not good reason, then at least some reason for every tiny detail of a story. Some authors are careless with their details, but for the most part authors are very particular about what details they use.
Chekov’s Gun is another way of saying that, at least for stories, everything really does happen for a reason. Sometimes people over-generalize this principle from stories to life.
I wanna see more people randomly coughing or sneezing in movies/shows.
100% of the time, a cough or sneeze is Chekov’s Sick. It’s boring. I want some character to pause in the middle of a rant, cough, go back into their rant, and attention never to be brought to it.