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
Well, that’s a relief.
Hands up if you’ve read Chekovs gun as “Star Trek Chekovs Phaser” for near fifteen years and won’t stop.
Look again at that dot. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every “superstar,” every “supreme leader,” every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there–on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.
The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds.
Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.
The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.
It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we’ve ever known.
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