Words of Wisdom: The Chekhov's Gun Paradox

You have your story scripted out to it fullest and now it is time to breath life into your work. You’ve constructed your character profiles and have built your plot. Now comes the third act twist! Your audience won’t see this coming!

...Will they?

How do you foreshadow future events while still not tipping your hand and exposing the big reveal?

Ladies and gents, I am here to talk to you about one of my favorite tropes: Chekhov’s Gun. What is Chekhov’s Gun? It is a dramatic principle used in storytelling. It is a guideline to trim the fat from a story, and it says any unnecessary elements should be removed. The man behind the trope, Anton Chekhov, said this: "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."

Chekhov’s Gun often comes hand-in-hand with another writing technique: foreshadowing. Foreshadowing hints at future events without outright stating what they are. It is important to define both because they are so intertwined, they step into each other’s territory. When writing a story, your very first goal is to build its universe, to define its laws and what isn’t allowed. The second thing you should do is ensure that everything from that point onward carries an internal sense of cohesion and continuity.

There are plenty of things that you must describe but are never intended to be used as a Chekhov’s Gun.

“He turned onto the gravel road.”
“Cars whizzed by as she opened the front door to her house.”
“Whereas his sister seemed excited by this news, he could help but feel bored.”

Here we have descriptors for location, the senses, and emotion. These are not a Chekhov’s Gun because you are constructing your environment here, giving it depth and a sense of realism that is needed to color your story. They are not related to plot or storytelling in any sense of the word. It’s normal to say such things about everyday life, let alone your fictional world.

The rules for a Chekhov’s Gun are a little different. It is mentioned just like everything else in your story, but two questions are very different. When is it introduced? How should it be introduced? They are careful questions to weigh because it is very possible to fall into the Chekhov’s Gun Paradox.

You must ask yourself these questions, no matter your genre. In adventure stories, a Chekhov’s Gun can be a piece of information or an item of significance that can change the shape of a great battle. In horror, it can be a realization or a confession that swings the full force of horror onto your reader. A mystery may have a spent gun in the possession of someone who was thought to be nowhere near a crime scene. If something is to play an important role in your story, then it qualifies as a Chekhov’s Gun, and you must answer those two questions carefully in order to give both the dramatic significance they deserve.

There are generally four ways to introduce a Chekhov’s Gun.

The first is the symbolic importance of an item or location. It could be the husband at the scene where his wife died. It could be an opened picture album, dusty from never have been opened. A gun or a knife, powerful symbols of violence that have meaning across many cultures.

The second is contrast. You don’t expect to see someone in full military fatigues running down a crowded street, or normal animals suddenly starting to talk. By doing this, you’ve shown something as incongruous, and inherent reader curiosity makes your audience desire an explanation.

The third is framing. The scene is a married woman on the couch. Nothing out of the ordinary there, but what if she is described like this?

“She fiddled with her wedding ring and he saw the inner side of the band, its surface polished clean from its constant removal.”

Now there is possibly something of significance in an otherwise normal scene. Does that mean she is adulterous? Angry at her spouse? Let your readers speculate.

The fourth and final method is obfuscation. The goal is to hide plot-critical information by disguising it as something else. Writing is manipulation. It is your goal to make readers laugh, cry, scream, flinch, and cheer. It is to be orchestrated like a symphony. Plot devices, MacGuffins, and Chekhov’s Guns are often hidden in humor or described as a joke. The true significance of the Chekhov’s Gun is toned down for a greater reveal later. If you’ve made the presentation of your Chekhov’s Gun a funny situation, your audience will remember the laugh. They’ve processed what you wanted to tell them without them even knowing it.

In shorter fiction and nonfiction, it is best to have only one Chekhov’s Gun for maximum effect. Less is often more; not everything in the story needs to have dramatic significance. On that same token, if your story is significantly long, fewer Chekhov’s Guns are going to make their scarcity stand out all the more.

Now you know how to use a Chekhov’s Gun. How do you use one incorrectly?

I’m going to pick on Christopher Paolini’s Brisinger. Here is a scene from the book. Minor spoilers for those that haven’t read it.

After another squall of sharp clicks, the Ra’zac said, “He has almost found the name.”
“Who has?”
“Galbatorix.”
“The name of what?”
The Ra’zac hissed with frustration. “I cannot tell you! The name! The true name!”
“You have to give me more information than that.”
“I cannot!”
“Then we have no pact.”

It seems decent so far. It’s your standard foreshadowing, with the Chekhov’s Gun in this instance being a piece of information that cannot be spoken. Then something else comes along later in the story...

“I search for the answer!” Tenga exclaimed. “A key to an unopened door, the secret of the trees and the plants [...] I shall usher in the age of light, and all shall praise my deed.”
“Prey tell, what exactly do you search for?”
“[...] The same brand burns in your heart as burns in mine. Who else but a fellow pilgrim can appreciate what we must sacrifice to find the answer?”
“The answer to what?”
“To the question we choose.”
He’s mad, thought Eragon. Casting about for something with which he could distract Tenga, his gaze fell upon a row of small wood animal statues arranged on the sill below a teardrop-shaped window.

Here we have virtually the identical situation presented to the protagonist. The first can be excused because it can be intuited that the creature was under some sort of oath to not reveal that information. Fair enough. However, the second time presents Eragon with the means to discover that secret, but he ignores it by believing the man is mad. That is a reasonable assumption, but adding this scene induced a fatal problem in the story: it fell into the Chekhov’s Gun Paradox.

I keep bringing that term up, and now is as good a time as any to explain what it is. The Chekhov’s Gun Paradox is the line where providing contextual clues and foreshadowing for your story ruins the reveal of future events. You have tried to expertly craft a sudden reveal... but your audience already sees it coming. There is no tension when you know how the scene ends. If you don’t provide enough clues for the second or third arc twist, you’re going to blindside your audience and leave them confused. If you cross the line of the Chekhov’s Gun Paradox, then you might as well scrap your story because you told them how this plot thread is going to end without them having to read the next hundred pages.

In the Brisinger example above, there are two problems. The first example on its own works fine, but the second example is the stinker. It has a problem on its own, and also creates a problem because it is inherently coupled with the first example. By adding the second time where someone is looking for a grand secret, Paolini has called attention to it, and thus the same information is being retreaded. This scene is also hamstrung by the fact that we as the audience know there is some great secret to uncover, but Eragon is immediately dismissive of it. This is a fatal flaw in dramatic storytelling: audience is privy to information ahead of characters in the story. It’s not by deductive reasoning and guesswork on the audience’s part that they figure something out, but by the prose outright telling the audience something and refusing to grant its characters that same information.

Never call attention to the Chekhov’s Gun. Show it is there, but never call attention to it. It is your job as a writer to entertain your readers, even trick them at times. It is not your job to make absolutely sure that your audience sees the Chekhov’s Gun, it is your job to make your characters see the Chekhov’s Gun and have them act accordingly.

Parsing information is the hard part for some writers. Sometimes writers make the mistake of treating their background characters and the readers as the same person; just because the readers know something, that doesn’t mean a character knows something when they weren’t in that scene. You can’t assume they know anything. Other writers may add information to a scene based not on its right to be there, but because they are trying to manipulate what the audience is supposed to think or feel.

I did say that it is a writer’s job to manipulate readers, but have some integrity. Never do that at the cost of story quality. Don’t hide information from readers when they have every right to know it. Don’t tell readers with certainty things your characters don’t already know or suspect, either.

I’ve talked about this before. I reiterate, don’t have this massive arrow pointing at a sentence that just screams “THIS WILL BE IMPORTANT LATER. SEE THIS LINE? YOU’LL REMEMBER IT LATER.” It’s boring. Yes, it’s still foreshadowing, but now you’ve called attention to it and your readers see it coming. Good foreshadowing occurs when readers catch it in hindsight or during a second read. It’s shoddy and inferior writing when you include lines or scenes of dialogue that are there to manipulate what your readers think first, and whether it should actually be there second. Take it too far, and playing it straight becomes the surprise because your readers think so little of you.

So how do you avoid diving into the Chekhov’s Gun Paradox? How do you reveal information without actually revealing information?

My first tip? Ignore your audience at first. Each scene is part of a sequence, and each sequence connects into the next segment. What is more important is what your characters think. How will they react when they see the kid take his mother’s hidden gun and hide it in his own pocket?

Next, what is possible in your environment? A teenager from the ghetto isn’t going to get anywhere running from the cops while she is in the police station, but if she were on her home turf, she might know exactly where to run and what paths to take. Where your characters are when they find the Chekhov’s Gun is just as important.

Thirdly, how will discovering the Chekhov’s Gun make the plot move forward? In a horror story, finding someone who is supposed to be dead will change things. It will change them even more if the main character swears on their very life they saw them die. Anticipate the action and reaction of your characters.

Lastly, you calculate how this will affect your audience. Will it make them laugh? Cry? Start theorizing? The gun is there to make your audience think. Don’t tell them what it is for, just let it exist, and wait for the first person to pick it up.

Comments

[Journeyman]

I've got plenty of things to talk about, and advice to give, but I will openly accept suggestions should anyone have them.

Next time? I've written a lot of sexually explicit material. I think I'll publish some advice on that next.