Writers: Do you approve the use of the literary technique deus ex machina?

The one Shakespeare so oft uses.



Do you?Writers: Do you approve the use of the literary technique deus ex machina?
No way....



Nothing frustrates me more than reading a book, and when something is about to happen, all of a sudden there's a gun in the drawer. Or a car running across the street...



If you're going to save the protagonist from falling off of a cliff you better plant it way ahead of time...



My two cents...
No I prefer Chekhov's gun on the wall method.Writers: Do you approve the use of the literary technique deus ex machina?
No. It's so very annoying! And the person above me is right.
Not at all.

Maybe back during the times of the Greek theater that was an okay thing, but if someone just appeared, playing God, literally or figuratively, I'd be falling asleep.

Seriously, if your character is in some sort of trouble that he can't get out of, you should backtrack and fix it before you completely destroy the ending.

Also, while I haven't encountered many instances of deus ex machina in YA fiction, I do remember being disappointed by the end of the 2006 movie "War of the Worlds".Writers: Do you approve the use of the literary technique deus ex machina?
Not at all. It's flat out laziness. It works(ed) for the stage but not the written word.
I prefer Dosotevsky's long winded, so oft rambling, writing styles.

A genius, maybe even more than you.
Not really...but there's more excuse for it in a play, just because there's so much less time for plot development than in, say, a novel.
I wasn't aware Shakespeare used it?



It's often done because writers have got themselves into an improbable situation, made a mess, and need something to clear it up.



The term comes from Greek theatre when actors playing Gods used to literally come in on a crane-thing. It worked then, as most Greek plays were about man versus the gods.



For those who don't know, Chekhov's gun is a term derived from Anton Chekhov, who said that if there is a gun on the wall in Act 1 of the play, it must be shot by Act 4 (the end). Basically, everything in the book must have relevance and in theory a reader can work out what will happen, but in a good suspenseful way. I must add though that it is less effective in novels, because in the theatre you can always see the gun whereas in a novel, you would probably forget it amongst a sea of other things.