“Chekov’s gun is bad” fuck off brett
It’s a good rule if you have a very stupid audience, and a bad rule in literally every other situation
Introducing a concept and then having that concept pay off later is bad
That sure would be a silly opinion to hold if that was what Chekov’s gun actually was. Fortunately it isn’t!
“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.“
Requiring every detail of note in your story play a relevant role in the story, thus depleting it of all atmosphere, decoration, implication, and between-the-lines storytelling, fucking sucks
This is because Chekov’s gun is not a rule for storytelling in general, or for books, it’s advice for stage productions and the use of props in them
Chekov never talked about the “first chapter” he said the “first act”, because he was talking about the theatre, props in a production are eye catching and will distract the audience so they better fucking matter.
If you have a prop gun on the stage, someone better be doing something with it by the end of the play or you’re wasting the stagehands’ time
it’s a good piece of advice regarding not overdecorating your sets in stage shows where that adds significant costs both monetarily and in labor to the production and distracts the audience
it absolutely was never supposed to mean “every trivial detail in a book must absolutely be extremely significant five chapters later”
it’s only a stupid rule if you try to apply advice for stage production to writing novels
I feel like you guys are all taking a metaphor really literally. It basically means, “if you bring up an important plot point in act one, you better follow through with and resolve that shit.”
I think it’s useful to keep in mind in reverse – like, if your plot resolution turns on one of your characters knowing a lot about map-making, you’d better have dropped some hints earlier in the story that they have some interest in cartography, else it’ll seem like you just pulled it out of nowhere because you couldn’t think of any other way out of a plot corner. The trick is to do it subtly enough that viewers/readers don’t notice it and think “bet that’s going to turn out to be important later.”
Mooncustafer 