Being a Better Writer: Assembling Chekov's Armory for an Army—Building Your Plot Mechanics [Part 2]

A secondary piece to these thoughts.

Has this ever happened to you? You're reading a story. Book, fanfic, whatever. You're making your way along, things seem fine so far. Then, in the middle of a big scene, a character says or does something ordinary and the characters react like it's a big deal ... except that it isn't. At least, not until, in the middle of that scene, after X character has declared something that—to the characters in the story, anyway—is quite shocking, the story takes a left turn into a flashback (often a lengthy one) explaining why event Y that just happened is significant.

Ooh. Ouch. Yeah. What you've just been victim of is the literary equivalent of a drive-by shooting, a plot in which a writer has failed to properly establish relevant information that the reader should know. The writer has reached a key scene, made his big reveal, only for the writer to realize that the reader has absolutely no clue why what just happened is significant. So, rather than go back and properly set everything up, the writer elects to include a flash-back, mid-scene, explaining to the reader what just happened. The playwright has halted the play and walked on stage to say "Oh, and by the way, the reason that Hamlet performed this whole play in the first place was because, um, I might have forgotten to mention, his father has been murdered and he suspects his uncle." In effect, you—the reader—now need to stop reading the story, because the writer didn't give you all the relevant details earlier.

Unfortunately, while this is a gaping flaw for any work, television has made us much more accepting of it. Thanks to numerous TV shows that run far past the initial established plot elements, it seems that as a whole we've become accepting of the "sudden-event-that-changes-everything-but-was-in-no-way-foreshadowed-because-lets-admit-it-the-whole-thing-was-dreamed-up-last-night." In fact, some even hold that the "flashback" method for revealing plot crucial elements is the way to go, because it's more exciting.

These people are wrong, and if you follow their advice, you will end up crafting a deeply flawed story. Because no-one really loves having a fight scene interrupted with a random flashback that spends the next few pages explaining why the fight is important. It destroys the pacing, kills the mood, and should have been clear when we went into the fight.

And if you're going to do that, that means that once again, you're going to need to dig into a Chekov's Armory.

For those who aren't familiar with the term (and we could probably all use a refresher), Chekov's Armory stems from Chekov's Gun, a law of story declaring that everything in your story should be relevant to your story. The name of the rule stems from a famous quote by short story writer Anton Chekov: 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."

The practice of placing these "guns" across your story and in large numbers is what gives you a Chekov's Armory—a large collections of items or events mentioned in passing in the first parts of the book that come back to be quite significant later on. The practice of using flashbacks to retroactively explain something to the reader that should have been mentioned in earlier chapters is a writing issue where the creator of the story has failed to insert their guns.

A Chekov's Armory is good. It's something that you want to have. So how do you use it? The first and foremost answer is planning. If you want to write a well-crafted story, you're going to have to plan things out. Know where you want the story to go, what you want to have happen before you get too deeply into it so that you can lay the groundwork for the eventual conclusion. Sit down and figure out a few of your biggest moments that you'd like to write. What will your characters need to reach this location? What skills must they have? What is the turning point? Work backwards, starting with how you want things to end. Put the elements of the scene together. Backtrack. What can you hint at earlier (if you're a "write-as-you-go" sort of writer, you can make this work as well, just understand that you'll probably be doing a lot of revision before the end)?

Now, once you've worked out what you want to use as your Chekov's Gun, you'll need to figure out exactly where and how to work it in. Ideally, a Chekov's Gun is something that will attract just enough attention from the reader to be noticed, but not enough that it is vitally clear to the reader what they're looking at. Unless you're trying to be clever (lampshading or subverting), the majority of the time a Chekov's Gun is mentioned, you want the reader to remember it, so it must be noteworthy, but not so much that the spend the rest of the book waiting for it to be used (an exception here is for something that will raise the tension over the course of the story, such as a remark that something is so big it must fall. The reader will from then on, be wondering if said object will fall).

A great example of a well-used Chekov's Gun, perhaps one of the best ones I've ever read (or at least, the longest running), is from Robert Jordan's famed Wheel of Time series. In one of the first books (I believe the second), the main character is being tested on his swordplay by a noted Warden. At the conclusion of the training, the Warden mentions that Rand has succeeded in learning every move that he can teach him, and now Rand knows how to use them all—including a move called the Final Sheath (?), which is the only move that they cannot practice. The Warden, Lan, warns Rand that the move is only a final resort. Twelve or so books later, Lan, faced with desperate battle, finally performs the aforementioned move in a climactic scene.

It's a classic Gun, mentioned beforehand and then turning out to be vital in a final moment. Even better, the wording is careful enough that the reader notices it. Then, all that time later, similar wording is used when it's brought up again, which draws the reader's mind back to that first mention.

Once you have your guns chosen, it's time to figure out exactly how you're going to set them up. Are you going to mix one into casual conversation between characters? Pair it with a red herring so that your readers won't guess what it is? Will it be something you set up as early as the prologue, or will you wait until the chapter beforehand?

Once you have a rough idea of when, where, and how you're going to set these guns up for your story, get to writing! Check your pre-reader reactions and see how they react. Did they pick up on it immediately? Or were they pleased when the gun inevitably fired? Or perhaps not pleased? Back to writing!

Sometimes it might take a few tries to get right, especially the first time. But the reward at the end will be worth it. Your story will flow better. Your pacing will be much more natural. Your readers will thank you (silently, if nothing else). You will improve as a writer. Eventually, you'll reach a point where it seems like second nature to slide the Chekov's Gun's into your work as you progress, and you won't even question yourself as you simply do.

So, until next time, good luck, and get writing!

Comments

[The Floppiest Fishy]

Perfect timng. I just realized that a big tense scene I've been working on was missing something. Looks like I forgot to slip in the Gun to make it relevant.

Thanks, Viking.