Oct 2017
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SirGutsalot
Oct '17

When you writing the script for your comic or plan for your story and realise you have just pulled a solution to the HUGE problem out of the air in your story just because...ummm...yeah just because...
It gets bad when you realize this way down the track after you've published your work.

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    Oct '17

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    Oct '17
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LordVincent
Oct '17

Most Deus Ex Machinae's occur when you give a character a tool or a skill whose existence has not already been established or hinted at.

It's fiction. You can toss pretty much whatever you want at the reader as long as you hint at it beforehand so that when the truth hits it feels like a reveal or answer, rather than an asspull to get out of a specific situation.

Another thing to remember is people have different requirements on the scale of interesting to asspull.

One random example would be the Eren-titan twist in AoT (yeah I don't like AoT but it was the first example I could think of). Some would call that an interesting escalation, arguing that the existence of titans has already been established and that this escalation is not only justified in the way it was presented, but that it also helps the story make more sense.
Others would call it an asspull, because while the existence of titans has been established, they didn't think there were enough hints present in regards to this specific character, and thus it came out of nowhere.
The group that didn't think it was an asspull would then counterargue that dropping too many hints makes it too obvious and drags the story along unneccessarily.
The asspull group would then get pissy and call the other group impatient and make the assumption that they're 13 or younger.
The other group would then call the asspull group a bunch of sissy virgins.
Flamewar ensues.

Anyways, the definition of a bad writing move difffers very much depending on whom you ask, and as long as you learn to practice a few basic things that will help you as an author create a more stable story so you don't write yourself into a corner or over/under-dramaticize anything to the extent that it loses the effect you intended for it to have, you should be fine. An actual deus ex machinae would often make it hard for you as a creator to work with the project in preferrable ways.

Learning to fix your old mistakes through later writing is a skill in and of itself and something many serialized lone creators (especially webcomic creators) are having to learn these days. It's preferrable if the mistakes never occurred in the first place, but personally I would also say that learning to outweigh or fix mistakes post-publishing helps improve your creative writing skills a whoooole lot. Because lord knows it ain't easy.

joe_galindez
Oct '17

Like @LordVincent said, the best way to avoid ass-pulls is to practice foreshadowing3. For example, when Hermione pulls out the super-convenient Time-Turner, it's not an ass-pull because the audience has been primed for this sort of revelation. Given this new information, Hermione's extra-heavy class load and occasional confusion at what time it was suddenly made sense.

Chekhov's gun is a related concept.

Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.

If you don't want the audience to wonder where the gun came from, you must spend some time with the gun at the beginning of the story.