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Comment by zorr | Hacker News Reader

I've seen this principle come up a few times but I don't think I fully understand it.

For example, assuming a passage in a story where a protagonist enters person X's house and a particular room is described in much detail. The described detail does not necessarily advance the story but instead does "character building" hinting at the personality of person X. There literally could be a loaded gun hanging on the wall because X is a secluded hunter living in a cabin. Is this then a violation of the principle?

Edit: I've recognized the principle a few times, mostly in TV shows with lingering camera shots on seemingly unrelated objects, and as another commenter mentioned, it can frequently spoil a surprise twist. There is also a vague line between spoiling the twist and foreshadowing.

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> There literally could be a loaded gun hanging on the wall because X is a secluded hunter living in a cabin. Is this then a violation of the principle?

Yes. If the gun doesn't appear anywhere after its first mention, then it should not have been described. This is quite literally what Chekhov says, and I think he's right.

It works the other way too. In order for a gun to be used in a story, it has to have been alluded to before. A character cannot suddenly find a gun in their hand and use it in any significant manner. If they do, the audience will feel cheated and be upset. But avoiding this pitfall is super easy, all one has to do is just present the gun a few moments before it is needed.

It the final scene of "Sea of love" (1989), Pacino's character overpowers the bad guy with an object he finds under the bed. This object has been shown to the audience before. If it hadn't, the scene would not have worked.

Of course, rules exist to be broken... but do so at your own risk.

I disagree. Elements in a story should help communicate character setting or plot, preferably more than one at the same time, but I think it's perfectly fine to introduce elements that only communicate setting and/or character without being part of the plot. Character and setting are important parts of a story.

If something communicated neither character setting or plot then it should be cut.

If a detail does character building then it’s done it’s job. The point is it should have a job to do.

I think the example of a gun is an extreme one. A gun on the wall isn’t just any old background detail, it’s going to grab the audiences attention, and hold that attention. It’s a serious distraction, far more than most other background details, an ominous threat of violence hanging over every scene it’s in. Whether you intended that as an author doesn’t change the fact that this is what it’s effect is going to be. If your going to put it there, you’d better have a plan for resolving the tension it’s going to create, whether it gets fired or not.

I’m not sure I entirely buy Checkhov’s point as a hard rule, sometimes your just doing a bit of world building, but I think he chose the example fo a gun on the wall as an extreme example. There’s no dodging that one.

The best stories frequently break the principle. There is a ton of worldbuilding done in even simple-reading stories like the Hobbit, that are largely irrelevant to the greater whole, but serve to give the reader a better perspective.

Mindlessly following Chekhov's Gun, in my opinion, will always result in pulp fiction. Whether it's TV or novels, or movies. If you've stripped a story down to the bare basics, all you're left with is predictability that gives the reader an easy ride.

Not to say that's always a terrible thing. After a stressful day, pulp fiction can be the perfect way to relax. Most people have something mindless that they enjoy.

But it is incredibly rare that you end up with something truly great if you religiously follow the principle.

Alexandre Dumas did, and his stories are among the best there are.

Did he? Cause his original version does not have only purposeful things in it. Like detailed descriptions of evens in tavern that have nothing to do with later developments whatsoever.

Also, sometimes entire movies are made about some of these "inconsequential" details much later. If a gun appears in scene one, but only goes off in the sequel, are we in violation of this rule?

If you've stripped a story down to the bare basics, all you're left with is predictability that gives the reader an easy ride.

I think you'd have a hard time finding a Chekhov short story that you can dismiss as an 'easy ride' or 'pulp fiction' and many of them are very, very short.

spoiler alert

My personal favorite is how in Once Upon a Time in Hollywood, the "gun" is a dog.

I hated The Hobbit for its endless descriptions that, for me, only evoked boredom, so I wouldn't use it as a good example. The meadows were very green, the forests wre very dark, and the spiders were very large, yes! I know! Get on with it ffs...

I liked the descriptions of landscapes and cityscapes in Jonathan Franzen novels. They have the earnest and surreal feel of a diorama in a museum. I like dioramas for some reason.

Great fanatasy (world-building) literature enhances Chekhov's Gun. In Tolkien's stories everything has meaning and is used somewhere and somewhen else. But not necessarily in the same story.

In The Lord of the Rings there are hundreds of "guns" hanging at the wall, which are not directly involved in this three books' story. But the reader feels that they are not only decorations. And the reader could do some research on Tolkien's work to find out about their story and importance for the characters' backgrounds. That makes the magic I believe.

The tiny ring of invisibility which Bilbo uses as a plot devise to escape a few times, turns out in Lord of the Rings to be the most important artifact in Middle Earth.

About as Chekhov's Gun as it gets.

I wouldn't say that leaving frequent references to the depth and age of the world, and then filling in the Legendaria in note form for the rest of your life, is much related to this concept. If a sword hanging on the wall belonged to an ancient hero, already dead, and known to everyone in the scene, a paragraph with "Here is hung Such-and-such, the bright blade of so and so with which he did $mighty-deed" doesn't have to carry any more weight in the story. There might be a whole book or chapter about so and so, there might not be.

The tiny ring is not the only detail in that book. Checkov gun is that everything must have purpose, not that a thing with purpose exists somewhere inside.

fwiw, Tolkien wrote the trilogy only after fans requested an encore of The Hobbit. The ring's importance/malevolence was a retcon.

Some good stories break Chekhov's Gun, but only in the same way that a good story would break any rule of storytelling, which is to say, the author knowingly breaks it in a calculated way that compensates for the known deficiencies that would otherwise exist as a result of not following the rule.

It in no way follows, as you're suggesting, that Chekhov's Gun is some arbitrary inconvenience, or that you can gleefully ignore the amount of detail you introduce relative to the interesting bits, which is what a real rejection of Chekhov's Gun would entail.

Your purported counterexample recognizes as much: that yes, it's detail that doesn't have a shocking payoff, but which was still accomplishing something and which Tolkien certainly weighed against the "cost" of continuing said detail arbitrarily deep.

It really is an anti-pattern to equate, "oh yeah in some circumstances it's okay to break this rule" with "you will write a better story by completely ignoring all constraints of this rule".

> It really is an anti-pattern to equate, "oh yeah in some circumstances it's okay to break this rule" with "you will write a better story by completely ignoring all constraints of this rule".

I really don't think I said that, at all:

> Mindlessly following Chekhov's Gun...

> ... if you religiously follow the principle.

The takeaway should be that the principle, like all principles, is not universal, and isn't appropriate at all times. Nuance and consideration should be part of writing.

It makes somewhat more concrete sense when you take into account the startling brevity of some of Chekhov's own work. I don't think you have to agree with the notion as some universal literary principle to appreciate he was a consummate and successful adherent to his own advice.

I think it's kind of strange that people interpret this as a trope/rule/device. It's really just advice from Chekhov.

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