Writer's Blog: Chekhov's Squirt Gun (Patreon)

Wordcount: 462k

Next Update: October 27

Warning: Spoilers!

Another blogpost, which means another entry in the “things I plan to change during Mind Blind’s rewrite.” Not to be repetitive, but it’s where my head is at right now. My list of future fixes is sixty-eight bullets point long as of the writing of this post, and I fully anticipate it surpassing one-hundred by the end of the month.

Today I’m going to talk about a gun. Chekhov’s gun, to be precise, and the retroactive planting of figurative firearms throughout the narrative.

Chekhov’s gun principle states that if a gun is shown in the first chapter, it needs to go off in a latter chapter. I’m not the best at following this advice, which states that every element in the story must be necessary. Sometimes I include elements because those elements can make for a good pun (as far as any pun can ever be considered “good”). I disagree that every single thing needs to be essential to the story. Sometimes, the squirt gun included in the first scene is just there to illustrate someone’s personality (fun-loving, slightly childish, not above violence)—it doesn’t ever need to go off.

What I do believe is that if a gun ever does go off, readers should already know that there’s a gun in play.

. . .I really wish that Chekhov had used a different metaphor, because this blog post feels unnecessarily violent. Basically, this is a roundabout way of reiterating that I’m a huge fan of foreshadowing. Or rather, I’m an anti-fan of deus ex machina.

Despite my distaste for unforeseeable twists, I’m also somewhat of a “pantser” when writing. I know the ending of my story, but I rarely have a complete vision of how I’ll end up there, preferring to let the characters do the work and take me as they will. This approach makes foreshadowing extremely difficult to implement in the first draft, although I do my best.

Sometimes, however, my attempts to insert foreshadowing doesn’t pay off. The most obvious example of this misfiring is with Sally’s visions. In particular, her vision involving Glitch.

When I wrote that scene back in Chapter 5, I had no intention of letting Button refuse Noh’s offer of assistance. Thus, Glitch and Noh would be forced to cooperate together. Button would get abducted, and Glitch would lash out at Noh for suggesting XYZ in the first place.

Things changed since then.

For one, Button was already hauled off by AL in Chapter 11, and too many kidnappings would come across as redundant. Secondly, you can now (completely justifiably) tell Noh to gtfo. Both these new factors require that Sally’s vision about Glitch be altered. I’ll most likely make it about the Chapter 11 abduction instead with Glitch getting mad at Rosy, and am only waiting to edit in case I get a better idea (maybe Button still will go through Kidnapping 2.0, if it naturally fits the story like I initially planned). But for now, it remains a never-to-be-fired gun.