NARRATIVE TECHNIQUES
Do You Show a Gun in Your Story? You Have to Get It Fired!
Each element in a story has a specific function — Chekhov’s gun lesson.
You are watching a thriller movie.
In the movie’s first scenes, a character opens a drawer to get cigarettes. In the drawer, immediately closed, you can glimpse a gun for a moment.
You don’t pay much attention to it, but your brain still records the information.
You can be sure that before the movie ends, that gun will fire.
This is a classic example of the application of Chekhov’s gun narrative technique.
What is the narrative technique of Chekhov’s gun?
Chekhov’s gun is a narrative technique theorized by the Russian writer Anton Chekhov (1860–1904).
It is based on the principle that every element of a story must be indispensable, and a writer should remove all unessential elements.
Those elements can take any form. They can be an object, a phrase, a character, or an image.
“If a gun appears in a novel, it must shoot”
Anton Chekhov
Chekhov’s gun: another example
The protagonist of your story is Sam, an amateur hunter who decides to go hunting with some friends over a weekend.
At the beginning of the story, describing Sam, you tell that he is wearing a red baseball cap.
Sam is chasing prey, gets lost in the woods, and runs into a bear.
As Sam runs away from the bear, he loses his red cap. It will be precisely the red cap that will allow his friends to understand the direction of his escape and help him.
Why should irrelevant elements be removed from the story?
A good fiction writer knows that a story has to be believable by the readers but doesn’t have to be the same as reality.
A story full of irrelevant elements, of “guns that don’t fire”, is too similar to the randomness of life.
The presence of too many unnecessary elements to the story’s development confuses but, above all, bores the readers.
Chekhov’s gun exception: the Red Herring
As an exception to Chekhov’s gun principle, you can introduce an element only to divert the reader’s attention and lead it astray.
This technique is called Red Herring and is often used in detective stories when an innocent seems to be guilty because of false clues.
By cleverly mixing Chekhov’s gun and Red Herring narrative techniques, it’s possible to create engaging stories for the reader.
Conclusions
The fundamental lesson of Chekhov’s gun is that each element in a story has a specific function.
So we can insert an element at the beginning of a story that will help us conclude it, but above all, we have to eliminate all superfluous elements.
While learning how Chekhov’s gun principle works can be an inevitable “spoiler” for any future books, movies, or shows you read or see, knowing it will help you tremendously build your stories.
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