In 1889, on a cold and likely snowy November day in Moscow, Anton Chekhov wrote a letter to Aleksandr S. Lazarev. In his strange little house on Sadovaya-Kudrinskaya Street, possibly while waiting for his next patient, he scrawled,
“One must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.”
And thus began the popularized literary principle we know as Chekhov’s Gun. Certainly, this general knowledge existed before Chekhov (Greek tragedy, Shakespeare, French neoclassical drama), but there was something about how Chekhov phrased it that made it stick.
Today, we largely think of this principle as an exhortation to writers to keep the promises they make to readers. At the time of that particular letter, however, Chekhov was also concerned with the removal of unnecessary details. In later recollections by others, such as Sergius Shchukin, Chekhov elaborated by saying, “Remove everything that has no relevance to the story.”
In future letters to various recipients, he reiterated these ideas, pushing for economy in storytelling and the full use of whatever remained. But these days, we are mostly left with the distilled idea: If you show a gun hanging on the wall in Act I, it must go off by Act III.
So, while Chekhov did believe that a promise to the reader should be kept, he was also very much in favor of the idea that every important thing must be said, while every unimportant one should be mercilessly cut.
The reasons for the rest of us having kept part of the advice at the expense of the other are many and varied, not the least of which is that literary theory continued developing.
Hemingway, though an admirer of Chekhov’s, did not embrace his creed in toto. Certainly, Papa was a student of minimalism, but he was also a heavyweight champion of the unsaid. Those things left out were not, by default, unimportant. In the 1958 interview in The Paris Review, Hemingway gave an excellent description of his own writing philosophy and, at the same time, further developed Chekhov’s idea:
“…I always try to write on the principle of the iceberg. There is seven-eighths of it underwater for every part that shows.”
So, while Chekhov might have said, “If the gun is on the wall, it must fire,” Hemingway’s version might have gone, “If the gun is on the wall, the reader may never see it fire, but they will feel its weight.”
The original intent behind the gun principle also suffered thanks to the rise of more plot-driven and descriptive literary efforts, which resist cutting all unessential elements simply as a matter of style. After all, the presence of the gun is more memorable than its absence. While certainly not to be elevated to the domain of the masters, the rise of the pulp magazine and the peak of the mass market paperback — which in some ways foretold the kind of binge reading we now see with modern subscription services such as Kindle Unlimited — did not lend to this kind of restraint. And, certainly, current readers are much less interested in parsing through pages to find subtle symbolism than they are in the memorable and immediate.
In short, our current understanding of the gun principle — with its foreshadowing and satisfying payoff — is sexy. Cutting the dross, on the other hand, is the sort of thing that happens in a cold, drafty attic by the light of a single, flickering candle. But it can be argued that a great story needs the principle with both its parts. The fired gun provides the loud report. The ruthless cutting provides the room to let that report echo.
Perhaps the next time we are congratulating ourselves on the loud bang! of a discharging literary firearm, we could also stop and listen for the echo. If it’s not there, if the sound doesn’t reverberate, then maybe we haven’t given it enough room. Instead of asking only, “Did the gun go off,” perhaps we could also ask, “Should that gun have been in the room at all?”
And somewhere in Moscow, on a cold and snowy November day, a certain doctor-playwright will nod, put down his pen, and smile as he rises to answer the timid knock of an arriving patient.