The Case Against Chekhov's Gun
Wednesday, October 6, 2010 at 7:41AM
Chekhov's Gun is generally regarded as a brilliant principle for writing tight narrative. The Russian playwright Anton Chekhov wrote:
If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired.
He elaborates that if you don't plan to fire your firearm in a subsequent act, then it doesn't belong in your story, and you should remove it entirely.
The widely accepted interpretation is that nothing should be present in your story unless it's serving some critical narrative purpose. Judicious application of Chekhov's Gun can rid your story of elements that aren't doing anything for you.
It might well be you're better off without that methodical scene in which a character checks into her hotel room, takes a shower, and goes to sleep for the night. And it's true, if you leave too many loose ends floating around, your final scenes risk leaving the reader feeling dissatisifed.
Generally, the novels I enjoy most adhere (loosely) to the Chekhov's Gun principle. For single-media narratives, it's an important reminder to be aware of what work each scene, paragraph, sentence is performing to keep your story rolling along.
There are problems with Chekhov's Gun even in traditional media, though, particularly where it meets up with Occam's Razor. From time to time, I've found an author adhere so zealously to the gun principle that an entire story unravels into tired predictability.
If your story is so tightly wound that every element serves a single distinct function, the discerning reader can often deduce what that function is. Yawn. So the principle is always best used with a bit of caution.
In transmedia, though, you just might be better off forgetting you ever heard Chekhov's name.
Locate Your Exits
I learned long ago from Uncle Jim that everything in a novel should reveal character, advance plot, or support theme. This is much looser, and it's something I can very nearly agree with.
For transmedia, I'd add one more item to Uncle Jim's list: Adding color to your world.
Part of the juggling act that is telling a transmedia story involves creating depth and richness. You need to signal that there are more and deeper stories going on in your world than the single narrative at hand -- your world has to seem bigger than your characters. That means introducing elements that provide color and flavor to your transmedia world, even if they won't be immediately relevant to the story you're telling.
But there's another reason to do this in transmedia, too. You need to build in escape routes and back doors, because you never know when you'll need to make a hasty exit. This is particularly the case if you're planning on telling an ongoing narrative.
I wrote two years of Perplex City Sentinels, and in the process left so many guns lying about that you'd think a war would break out by the end, so to speak. Nothing ever came of Crispy Heaven's health violations. We never went anywhere with 78-year-old puzzle design superstar Alan Willow, and the cracks in the Mobius Strip were, indeed, nothing but ordinary wear and tear, never to be spoken of again.
But for every throwaway piece of color we never touched again, there was another that we picked up onto our needles and knit into the fabric of the story weeks or months or years later, because suddenly it solved a problem we didn't see coming, or added a complication that made for a more interesting story. A mayoral election produced a new political nemesis for Sente Kiteway. A recording mogul became the employer to a sociopathic killer. A name fabricated for a single quote became a double agent working for the police to undermine a secret society.
We never knew what we'd need next, but we knew we could look back on our established canon and be sure we'd find something that would help us out of our latest pickle. We did this so often that it became our team motto: Ita est tamquam haec consulto fecerim. It's like we did it on purpose.
Your takeaway: The multithreaded and sometimes reactive nature of transmedia means that you can't always go back and revise your first act to include a gun if it turns out, now that you're in the third act, that you really needed one. Sprinkle your story with guns, just in case.
This is true of both spiderweb and sequential transmedia. If you establish in the movie that Bob dropped his gun into the river, you can't have him pull it out of his pocket in the comic that immediately follows. It's a curious opposite to narrative structure in a single-medium story. In transmedia, if you don't leave yourself loose ends in case you need them later, the resulting overarching story might actually be weaker.
Continuity can be a real storykiller.
So what do you think? Should we abandon Chekhov and his philosophy on ballistics for transmedia, or can you make a case for keeping him around? Take it away, Machinites.
Reader Comments (19)
Sort of like the difference between a movie and a television series. Very few know the ending for season five when they're writing season one, but everyone knows how the movie script will end.
Here's my question for you, Andrea: how much of the gun-planting is conscious? I can see this kind of advice resulting in a lot of artificial, forced "gee wouldn't it be cool if we dropped that into the mix?!?!" elements.
In other words, presuming I buy your theory on guns in transmedia (I do), what's your practical advice for deciding how many, where, what caliber, which ones are loaded, etc.?
I think it's fairly easy for your seasoned players to filter out 'colour' unless you've made it unreasonably confusing (e.g. not established patterns of discovery), but even then, one should be careful.
I love not figuring out a plot twist, ending, etc., but not at the expense of a story free of superfluous diversions for the sake of it. Or worse, a gun mentioned in one of 200 tweets, blog posts, etc., that is never, ever referred to again until a murder so as to keep the players guessing about how things will turn out.
There's a balance to strike that will hopefully satisfy most players, but that a clever few may figure out and a slower or more distracted few will never have seen coming. I think it's hard to find, though, especially when the creators are so familiar with the world.
Thanks for this post, Andrea, and all your regular, thoughtful posts. It's a great treat to read your blog, even if I mostly lurk!
Scott: In the case of PXC, we did a lot of intentional *color* with the idea of building out the world. But we really and genuinely never meant to go anywhere with much of it. There was a lot of: "Hmm, what did we do last month? Oh, that celebrity got engaged? Let's have her leave him at the altar this week." C-plot stuff that didn't actually do anything but world-building at the time.
Brrd: Nice to see you stop by, darling. ^_^ There's a whole other ball of wax in there -- the distinction between color and red herrings. I like color, I'm down on red herrings, and the difference is how heavily you signal narrative significance. This is probably something I'll need to write about at length another day.
Obviously, if you're only writing one novel, you kind of need to know where it's going before you get to the end, and make sure you presage it in the beginning.
But if you're writing a series of novels, for instance, the idea of littering your first book with loose ends is less problematic--extra bits add color, and you've got plenty to work with in the later books. I think LOST operated almost entirely on this principle; and, again, it was less to do with the medium and more to do with how often they had to produce material.
Dickens' novels, which are famously richly-charactered (and also full of loose ends) were originally written a chapter a day, so the structure permitted that kind of "open-fabric" approach.
Chekhov, obviously, didn't have the same luxury; whatever he wrote was worked on for a year and then went to stage exactly the same way every time.
(Ironically: Uncle Vanya fiddles with a gun in the first act of Uncle Vanya, but never kills anyone with it, while Tuzenbach in The Three Sisters is killed by a gun no one has ever seen--this is a rule that really should have been invented by Ibsen, since the "gun on the mantle" is the most famous part of The Wild Duck.)
That said, my favorite Chekhov's Gun (in this case also a strong element of continuity) is the small tortoise "sleepy enough to serve as a paperweight" in Stoppard's Arcadia.
Ourobouros: Oh, I'm not saying that Chekhov's Gun is about continuity, just noting that sticking to it too closely might lead to continuity problems for you down the road.
Novysan: I KNOW, RIGHT?! ^_^
A lot of the time fan-fiction is written based on questions fans *want* to have answered, but which aren't dealt with in the primary canon. They often seek to further explore themes and people and places that weren't touched, or were left with an unsatisfying conclusion.
In a sense, if done carefully, shelving Chekhov's Gun for a while _may_ indirectly be a way to foster a longer lasting fan community. Presuming of course they like the story/universe enough that's already been created :)
If this supposedly special gun is never fired, and the fans love the storyworld anyway, give it a short time and you'll probably see a fan writer produce their own spin-off story, all about that mysterious gun :)
I do like the idea of a few guns on the wall - whatever ones the audience is interested in, those are the ones that you fire. (And it leaves you room to go back for additional firearms later.)
But yeah, I think strictly speaking the spirit of Chekhov's Gun is still right; but in today's culture, the landscape of storytelling is changing (or rather expanding - there'll always be a place for Chekov's Gun), quickly.
I wonder how Schrodinger's Cat could play into this analogy... if the writer never fires the gun, how do you know if it was ever loaded? :)
Bruce: It is a fun analogy, isn't it? Though I think we're taking it a lot further than it was meant to go. ^_^ That's a good point about fanfic -- all of those open spaces leave room where your audience can stake a claim. Definitely a worthwhile endeavor.
Slackmistress: The location of the guns and walls change, too, which makes it complicated to be an audience member as well as a designer. Such are the perils of working in an emerging form.
2) OMG that is the coolest motto ever!
We were very fond of our motto. It seemed like magic after a while; it happened to often to be mere coincidence.
That's good.
But what some writers miss is that it has less to do with the story -- it does little for the larger *thing,* the greater sense of event and color and character and all that really cool stuff.
Transmedia works very well with the story, but plot is tricky in transmedia (in the same way it's tricky in writing RPGs) because you can be in danger of railroading the experience and forcing the plot.
It's morning, so Jeebus only knows if I'm making sense.
What I'm really saying, though, is great post, agreed, thumbs up, need more coffee.
-- c.
It's funny, actually -- all of this stuff I'm writing about is totally not new to *somebody.* Film people know all about developing a visual sense, RPG people know about leaving yourself plot hooks to catch onto later, etc.
I wish I could go take a crash course in best-principles for all of these other disciplines, the better to synthesize them. I bet I'd find a whole lot of lightbulbs there.
Their job was to travel the galaxy leaving tales of prophecy, Nostradamus-like, which they could exploit in the future.
So Paul gets trapped in the desert of Dune and is able to manipulate his potential captors by hinting that his arrival might be prophecy.
God, that sounds nerdy.