by Anne R. Allen
This week I’m visiting the writing blog, Writers In the Storm, talking about “Chekhov’s Gun.”
“If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise, don’t put it there.”…Anton Chekhov
Chekhov, the Russian playwright, also wrote short stories, essays, and instructions for young writers. The above admonition is probably his most famous writerly advice. It’s aimed at playwrights, but it’s true of all fiction writing.
His rule is telling us to remove everything that has no relevance to the story.
If chapter one says your heroine won a bunch of trophies for archery which she displays prominently alongside her replica of a medieval English longbow, she’d better darn well shoot an arrow before the story is done.
But Don’t Details Give Insight into Character?
What if that longbow is only there to show us what her apartment looks like? It’s very different from shadow boxes displaying a Barbie collection, or garish lampshades that would make a decorator cry. Décor gives important insight into a character, doesn’t it?
It depends. Yes, we do want to use details to set tone and give depth to our characters, but the key is how you stress those details when you first present them.
If there’s a whole page about those archery trophies, or the characters have a conversation about the importance of the longbow in English history, eventually you need to shoot some arrows.
Now, not every lampshade the author mentions has to show up two chapters later on the head of a drunken ex-boyfriend, but you need to be careful how much emphasis you put on that lampshade.
If you lovingly describe a terrible lampshade in several paragraphs and the lampshade never appears again, you have a forgotten “gun.”
Mysteries Need Red Herrings, Don’t They?
What if you write mysteries? Mysteries need irrelevant clues and red herrings. Otherwise, the story will be over before chapter seven.
But mystery writers need to manage their herrings. If the deceased met his demise via arrow, probably shot by a medieval English longbow, then our heroine is going to look like a viable suspect to the local constabulary.
Only we’re sure she didn’t do it because she’s our hero! Okay, that means the longbow and the trophies are red herrings.
But we still need to deal with them. Maybe not fire them like Chekhov’s gun, but they need to come back into the story and be reckoned with. Like maybe the real killer visited her apartment earlier when delivering Grubhub. Then he broke in later to “borrow” the longbow in order to make our heroine look like the murderous archer….
For the rest of the article, visit Writers In the Storm.
What about you, scriveners? Do you have trouble remembering to “fire” the Chekhov’s Gun in your stories?
Anne has a new Camilla mystery!
NPR fans, there are Easter Eggs in this story just for you!
When Camilla Randall allows a neighboring business to hold a “Moth Hour” storytelling event in the courtyard of her beachy California bookstore, she finds an inconvenient corpse left in the audience after the event. The deceased, a storyteller famous for his appearances on NPR, turns out to have a shady past — and a lot of enemies. Unfortunately, Camilla’s boyfriend Ronzo is one of them.
Anne, you hit my pet peeves as a reader. I don’t want to waste time following irrelevant tangents or getting to know and trying to remember names of characters who add nothing to the story.
I really admire authors who can incorporate interesting research tidbits into the action w/o slowing down the pace. That’s a real skill. Learning is part of the joy of reading but only when it moves the story forward while imparting knowledge.
The Hour of the Moth is a fun, fast read as all your books are.
BTW, I tried to leave a comment at Writers in the Storm but the site kept buffering.