The Chekhov’s Gun Threshold
I’ve just returned from this year’s Fantasy Con in Glasgow, which was, like last year’s event in Chester, exhilarating and exhausting in equal measure. This blog post is inspired by one of the panels I was on, and an idea that’s been buzzing round my head ever since. My fellow panellists were Jeffrey Collyer, RJ Barker, and Mike Brooks . The topic for discussion was portrayals of disability in fantasy fiction. Spoiler: there aren’t enough of them, and the ones that do exist are often Not That Good. One honourable exception is RJ’s own series The Wounded Kingdom, featuring a protagonist who is a assassin, and has a club foot. Apart from that, portrayals are often either lacking altogether, or have, um, unfortunate elements like the character with a disability being brutally killed fifty pages in. We all agreed that we would like to see more portrayals of disability in fantasy fiction, and discussed a bit about how best to include them.
Mike Brooks, who is partially deaf himself, mentioned that he has written a post-apocalyptic SF story in which the main character’s deafness was actually an advantage because it made him immune to the sonic warfare being waged around him. But he added that, in writing other stories, he sometimes feels like including a deaf character can be against the spirit of conservation of detail — if a character’s disability has no relevance to the plot, should it have a place in the story? In other words, does it pass the Chekhov’s Gun Threshold?
A question from the audience helped us tease out exactly what the concept of the Chekhov’s Gun Threshold is, and I have to say, I love this concept. For those unfamiliar with the term, Chekhov’s Gun is named after the Russian author Anton Chekhov, who gave this piece of writing advice: ‘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.’
These days the phrase Chekhov’s Gun is often used in conversations about the art of foreshadowing — ie, that if you need a gun to go off in the final act, you need to hang it on the wall in the first act. But in its original formulation, it’s actually about the conservation of detail. And this is where the threshold comes in. If you’re not supposed to put anything in a story that doesn’t directly contribute to the story, what level of information about a character is considered trivial enough to be below the Chekhov’s Gun threshold? If I mention on a character’s first appearance that they are tall and have blue eyes, does that need to be a plot point later on? Or am I just providing a basic physical description so you can picture this person? And if I mention that they also have a hearing aid, does that need to become a plot point? Or are they just — someone who is tall and has blue eyes and uses a hearing aid?
I think it’s probably safe to say that, in the mode of storytelling most of us are used to, it’s regarded as normal to give information about a character such as height and eye colour, without that then being expected to be relevant later. But a character with a disability — that’s considered to need some kind of in-story justification. Mentioning hearing aids or wheelchairs or service dogs isn’t just description, it’s information. It’s a gun hanging on the wall, and readers expect it to be fired.
Which is… well, it isn’t great. It’s analogous to the idea seen elsewhere that characters can be heterosexual without comment, but if you make them queer, there needs to be a reason. Why? People in real life are disabled, or queer, or even — gasp! — disabled AND queer, without there being a ‘reason’ for it. Part of pushing for better representation across the board, in SFF and elsewhere, is including characters of all varieties without the story having to justify the presence of variation.
Still, many readers, given a story with a disabled character, will expect there to be a justification for their inclusion, beyond ‘they’re just like that’. How can we as authors push back against this, and raise the Chekhov’s Gun threshold? Well, bringing things back to the panel, we talked about another concept, this one borrowed from politics — the Overton Window . This refers to the range of publicly acceptable discourse, and the applicability to fiction is simple: the more disabled characters people read about, the more readers will accept their presence in narratives without question.
So, the conclusion is: everyone write more stories featuring characters who have disabilities, but whose stories are not defined by those disabilities. Go!
