Hiya! I see you (and/or lizbob?) mention chekov's guns a few times recently. Do you have a post or link that talks about what those are? I feel like it might be a kinda-sorta inverted red herring but I've never heard of the phrase before.
The phrase is attributed to playwright Anton Chekhov, hence the name. It’s a very simple concept that applies to pretty much all fiction writing:
That every element in a story must be somehow RELEVANT to the narrative, otherwise it’s making a false promise to the reader/viewer and should be removed.
Most frequently it’s quoted along the lines of, “If you introduce a gun in the first act of a play, it must go off by the end of the third act.”
Chekhov himself is quoted in various ways making this same sort of comment. He equated it with making “false promises” to the reader (or to the viewer of a play). In a way it’s sort of like a red herring, but even something that’s a “red herring” has a narrative purpose. It’s one thing to DELIBERATELY mislead the audience in order to subvert expectations later in the narrative (what would a murder mystery be without that element of suspense, right?), but an element that doesn’t even have THAT narrative purpose and is otherwise just sitting there like an unfired gun that NEVER goes off...
That’s the difference. A red herring DOES “get fired” later in the story. It HAS a purpose in the narrative, even if that purpose is to serve as a distraction.
So all red herrings are chekhov’s guns, but not all chekhov’s guns are red herrings?
To clarify, if the gun is introduced, it must go off. But it the shot might miss its target. Or maybe it was fired into the ground. Or in self-defense and not murder. Whatever the case, it has no narrative purpose unless it is fired. Even if the firing of the gun is part of the trick. If it just hangs on the wall untouched for the entire play (or novel, or tv show or movie or whatever), there’s no narrative point to even mentioning it was there in the first place.
It’s the narrative equivalent of a movie studio announcing there’s queer representation in their movie, only to learn later that they simply hadn’t declared anyone’s sexuality at all, leaving it up to the viewer’s interpretation. They deceived the audience, and I think everyone agrees that’s a bad thing to do, right?
