Storytelling Elements: Chekhov’s Gun
“Because that’s how life is,” my friend said to me.
“Chekhov’s Gun works as a literary device because that’s how life is — you meet all these people, see all these things, and then they come back in various formats you never could’ve seen coming.”
— A friend of mine back in grad school, paraphrased
We were talking about story craft, in particular the concept of Chekhov’s Gun — which, if you’ve never heard the expression, refers to a rule invented by the celebrated playwright Anton Chekhov. The rule is simple: if a gun goes into a drawer in Act 1, it must come out and play a role in the story by the end of the play.
Why Is Chekhov’s Gun Useful?
In storytelling, we celebrate things that happen to us in real life by exaggerating them, blowing them up, making them the focal point for a while. And that’s a good thing because it helps people to appreciate life. With all its strangeness and complexity.
When writing a story, Chekhov’s Gun is a device that enables a storyteller to incorporate the classic life experience of “I forgot” into the craft of the tale, leaning on the story itself to distract the audience for a time before finally snapping shut a mousetrap (a simple machine) that could’ve been foreseen but most likely wasn’t. As a reader, this device provides a sort of shock alongside a degree of satisfaction — who hasn’t had the experience of forgetting some detail or even simply just doing the right thing and becoming someone people like and then think of when an opportunity arises?
The moral of the concept of Chekhov’s Gun is that we, living conscious beings that we are, never know what’s going to happen next. Kurt Vonnegut likened the experience of living to sitting on a couch hurtling through space and time, with only the ability to look backward. This analogy works well because human consciousness can remember what happened in the past with some clarity, but has a very difficult time predicting what will come next with certainty. So the experience of life is a lot like trying to remember what will happen next, making difficult predictions to attempt to optimize but always fully acknowledging that what comes next is unknown.
The process of creating a compelling Chekhov’s Gun device in your own story is simple, but as with many simple concepts, takes a bit of effort to truly master. In essence, what you’ll need to do, is write your story out the way you see it. Outline first, perhaps, perhaps not — it depends upon your drafting technique.
Once your story has been written, you’ll need to revise it to make sure that it “holds water” or, in plain English, that it maintains some degree of internal consistency. Even if that internal consistency is merely the messy narrative with little or no actual consistency except for the consistently unreliable narrator, or what have you. The stories we tell can be quite strange at times, and by no means is a Chekhov’s Gun device appropriate for all of them.
Use a Chekhov Gun in Your Own Work
If your story is suitable for a nice, sharp twist at the end, however, there are two ways of writing such a thing in and both are acceptable forms of story craft.
Introductory method — to add satisfaction to the end of your story’s rough draft, simply have a peek at your ending and go back to the beginning. Then rewrite the beginning as needed to add a level of spice to the ending. As a reader, there is something quite special about endings that match the beginnings — for example from pop culture, we can point to The Princess Bride, which is a story that is told by a grandfather to a grandson before bed. The viewer knows the story has concluded because the grandfather says so and turns out the light.
Conclusive method — to add the element that was already present in the introduction of the draft into the conclusion or climax of the story. This method is not as easy for me because I tend to write rough drafts rapidly, then redigest and rewrite until the work feels good enough. Sometimes I will wait awhile before writing the final portion of the draft to give myself some time to read back through the first bits and let the ending develop in my imagination, but most of the time I write the whole draft at once, and the earlier bits are influenced by what happens in the later bits. If the draft is stronger at the beginning than it is at the end, devices such as Chekhov’s Gun can be included to play on the reader’s sense of serendipity, making the work more meaningful by connecting directly to the strangeness of living.
When Are Literary Devices Best?
They say a story should be shown, and not told. That characters who get what they want make bad stories. And all of this is true of at least some tales, but we need to let our inner jazz musicians out at times too, to keep things spicy and fresh and interesting for the audience. Devices like Chekhov’s Gun can be used as described here, or they can be used to frustrate the reader and drive home alternative messages.
When employed skillfully, literary devices make our works stronger and more meaningful to our readers. I hope you’ve enjoyed this short discussion of Chekhov’s Gun literary device, its resemblance to our lived experience, and ways of incorporating it into our work to add or take away the reader’s sense of serendipity and satisfaction.
