Chekhov’s Gun in Reverse

You’re probably already aware of Chekhov’s Gun. If there’s a gun on the mantelpiece in the first act, it’s going to have to go off in the second. In other words, everything is relevant to the story, and if you’ve set up a development you’ll be expected to follow through.

You also have to consider the reverse of Chekhov’s Gun when you’re writing. If you need a gun to go off in the second act, you should put it on the mantelpiece in the first. In other words, put the elements of your story in place before you need them.

The book I’m currently reading has a scene in which the heroine comes face-to-face with a terrible monster. The scene pauses to go off on a long tangent explaining what this sort of monster is, why being devoured by one is a fate worse than death, and why it’s almost impossible to kill one. Then the action starts moving again, and the heroine defeats the monster.

This scene had some powerful elements, but it could have been a lot stronger if the exposition about the monster had come before we first saw it. The first appearance of the monster would have been a shocking moment if we already knew why this particular creature is so terrible and why its presence is so unexpected. The heroine’s triumph over it would have felt more impressive if we had had more time to absorb the knowledge that this monster is so difficult and dangerous to fight.

Even though the heroine knew of this creature’s existence from the start, we don’t learn about it until she actually meets it. The monster hasn’t been established as part of the world of the book, which means that ultimately this crucial scene comes across as slightly detached from that world, like a sudden dream sequence.

This could have been fixed just by taking the long expositionary tangent at the start of the encounter and scattering the information we learn in it through the earlier parts of the book instead. The heroine lost a member of her family to this monster, so it’d be natural for it to play on her mind, which means there’s plenty of opportunity to drop details about it here and there. That way, when the encounter takes place, the reader immediately knows why this moment is so significant and so dangerous.

If you don’t set up your plot developments adequately, you might look like you’re making things up as you go along. It’s entirely possible that you are making things up as you go along, of course, but hiding that from the reader is half the art of writing. Just go back to an earlier point, throw in a bit of setup or foreshadowing for the development you’ve just pulled out of thin air, and suddenly it looks like you’ve known what you’re doing the entire time.

You don’t have to set up every little thing that happens in advance. If it’s a critical event, though, make sure the reader’s familiar with the central moving parts before you set them in motion, unless an element is intended to be a surprise for the characters as well.

Avoid Repetition: Don’t Repeat Yourself

If you’ve already told this part of the story, you don’t need to tell it again.

In real life, when something interesting happens to someone, they’ll usually tell other people about it. I’ve probably told at least twenty people the ‘Fifty Shades of Greyhound’ anecdote.

In fiction, if something interesting happens to a character, they may realistically want to tell their friends about it, or they may have to recount it in detail to the police. If the reader’s already seen the event, though, they don’t need to hear it described later.

You can usually have these after-the-fact descriptions take place ‘offscreen’, or quickly gloss over them without writing them out word-for-word. For example, rather than using several hundred words to rewrite a scene that already exists in the book, you could just write, She told him about the Fifty Shades of Greyhound incident, and he walked out without a word.

That said, ‘don’t have characters describe events the reader has already seen’ isn’t a hard rule. Here are some scenarios in which you might want to have characters retell parts of the story you’re writing:

• The character tells the story in a way that highlights who they are. For example, if Sara wildly exaggerates her own heroism in the version she tells other people, that tells us something about her character.
• The character gets details wrong or interprets the event in a new way. For example, Sara and Rohan both witness the same event. Sara is the protagonist, so we already have her perception of it, but Rohan’s story later doesn’t match up.
• The character is flat-out lying, and the reader will notice the discrepancies because they’ve already seen the event.
• The retelling scene is important for the relationship between characters. For example, Sara has a traumatic experience and overcomes her usually private nature to tell Rohan, who comforts her.

Whatever your reason for retelling an event, make sure the retelling is interesting to read, or the reader will wonder why you’re going back over the same ground. If you can’t make it interesting, cut it. If you can’t make it interesting, but it’s essential, make it as brief as possible.

Retellings after the fact aren’t the only scenario in which an event might be repeated. If the characters discuss their plan in detail on the page, and then they carry it out exactly as planned, that again means you’re telling the reader the same story twice.

Sometimes you’ll see this problem dealt with by cutting away right before the plan is explained. For example, a novel might end a scene with ‘Okay,’ Sara said. ‘Here’s how we’re pulling off this heist,’ and then jump straight into the execution of the plan by starting the next scene with Sara looked down from the roof of the museum.

This can feel a bit conspicuous. The reader will notice that they weren’t allowed to hear the plan. From that they’ll conclude that the plan will probably go like clockwork, and that you’re trying to avoid repetition.

It’s often better to skip the ‘okay, here’s the plan’ line and go straight to the execution. If you want to make it clear that the characters have discussed their actions earlier, you can briefly allude to it while the plan’s actually being carried out:

Sara looked down from the roof of the museum. Too late to turn back now. She just had to hope Rohan remembered the plan.

High-Stakes Exhaustion

Supernatural is an American television series about two brothers, Sam and Dean Winchester, who hunt ghosts, demons and other dangerous supernatural creatures. In the first season, they’re trying to find their missing father. In the second season, they’re trying to discover the truth behind Sam’s visions of the future. In the third season, they’re trying to save Dean’s life. In the fourth season, they’re trying to save the world. In the fifth season, they’re trying to save the world. In the sixth season, they’re trying to save the world.

It continues in much the same vein. Supernatural has fifteen seasons.

The trouble is that, once you’ve made your protagonists save the world once, it can feel hard to go back to smaller-stakes stories. But your audience will run out of emotional investment if the stakes are relentlessly high. It’s tough for the fifth apocalypse to hit as hard as the first. If the characters have come through the last four apocalyptic threats unscathed, the reader won’t feel any real tension.

Huge consequences can also be difficult to grasp. Most readers will understand the weight of losing a person. It’s harder to look at the death of millions and feel the weight of every individual person who died, especially if your story has multiple disasters on that scale.

Of course, this doesn’t mean you can’t have very high-stakes stories. There’s always room for save-the-world tales. If you’re writing a standalone novel, the reader will come into the story fresh and prepared to get invested in any level of peril.

If you’re writing a series, though, and you have to keep coming up with new threats for your characters to face, don’t forget that smaller and more personal stakes are open to you. You don’t have to follow every victory by introducing the next disaster that’s threatening to wipe out all of humanity.

Sometimes you’re not fighting to save the world. Sometimes you’re fighting to save one person, or to uncover a mystery, or to find your sense of purpose. Readers can care about these things even if the fate of the universe isn’t at stake. Not only that, but the big-stakes stories will feel more dramatic if they’re used sparingly.

How to Keep a Short Story Short

soranokumo says, I know I should write more short stories that aren’t drabbles, but they have a tendency to become novels despite my best intentions. So advice on plotting out a short story and keeping it from spiraling out of control could be useful!

In a way, I have the opposite problem; no matter how ambitious the concept, my stories tend to end up short!

If you want to keep your short story under control, you can draw up an outline that focuses only on the essential points you need to hit. Where does your story begin? Where does it end? What are the things that absolutely have to happen between those two points?

For example, your story begins with a green traffic light. It ends with the traffic light turning red. What needs to happen between those two points? The traffic light needs to turn amber.

Of course, the story itself can include aspects that flesh things out without technically being essential, such as the traffic light’s romantic tension with the nearby stop sign. Sometimes you might feel that sticking to the bare essentials won’t leave enough substance to engage the reader.

Once you’ve pinned down those essentials, though, it’ll be easier to keep your story focused. If you start to feel that your story is getting out of control, take a look back at your skeleton outline, so you can remind yourself of what’s actually required and what can be cut. Superfluous detail can slow down a novel, but it can kill a short story.

A few more tips for keeping a short story short:

• If the ‘skeleton outline’ idea doesn’t appeal to you, just make sure you keep an eye on the ending. Once you have a concrete idea of what you’re aiming for, you can go straight for it without wandering off on lengthy tangents.
• When you switch between scenes, cutting directly to the action is often better than including a lengthy transition sequence. You don’t have to tell us how the protagonist travelled to the suspect’s house on public transport. You can jump straight to the protagonist kicking down the suspect’s door.
• Consider whether all the characters actually need to be there. For example, you might think it’d be fun for the main character to have a wisecracking sister. If the wisecracking sister doesn’t have a defined role in the plot, though, you’ll be throwing her unnecessarily into scenes to make wisecracks, which will make the story feel less focused. Give her an actual part to play. If there are no roles left for the wisecracking sister to take, consider either cutting her entirely or reworking the plan so she replaces a less interesting character.

How to Plot a Story

Wolfy says, Hello poorly-drawn spider! Can you tell me about how to plot a novel?

To be honest, I’m not great at plotting things out in advance. I’m impatient; I just want to jump straight into writing! I’ll often just write a few quick notes on the concept and get started. You can sometimes get away with that if you’re working on a short story, but having a plan is really useful, especially if you’re writing something longer.

Why you should have a plot outline (yes, me, I’m talking to you)

The advantages of drawing up a plot outline in advance, which I know very well and tend to cheerfully ignore:

• Having a plan keeps things focused. If you don’t know where you’re going, you might end up going on unnecessary tangents that just slow the plot down.
• It’s a lot easier to build up relationships between characters, make your character development convincing or sneak in foreshadowing if you know where things are going from the start.
• If you wander away from writing for a while, you’ll be able to remind yourself of the plan when you come back to it. Make sure you’ve noted down the solution to your murder mystery somewhere, at least. You don’t want to end up poring over the clues in your unfinished novel, desperately trying to work out whodunnit.

Plotting from the ending backwards

The most basic form of outline is an ending, a beginning, and a note of the major events that fall in between. It doesn’t have to be a big, intimidating, detailed thing, although of course it can be if that’s your style. A handful of bullet points or a quick spider diagram could be enough to get you started.

I mention the ending first because I think knowing how to end your story is the most crucial aspect of plotting. The ending is your goal. Once you know what that goal is, you can work out what needs to happen in order to move the story towards it.

For example, you want an ending in which your protagonist, introduced as a cynical loner who’s devoted to her own survival, joins the fight against her country’s totalitarian regime. She still believes it’s a hopeless struggle, but she’s decided she’s prepared to involve herself for the sake of her friends. Once you’ve pinned that ending down, the bulk of the book is immediately clear: you need to show how she develops connections with other people and begins to recognise the value of the rebellion.

You don’t necessarily have to have a perfect, clear, detailed vision of the story’s end before you do anything else. If you just have a vague idea of the note you want to end on, you can work out the details later.

Going back to the above example, your vision of the ending could just be ‘she demonstrates that she’s learnt to care about other people, even if she’s still cynical about the wider world’. That still gives you an idea of your direction, and, while you’re writing about your protagonist developing relationships with the other characters, you might be hit by inspiration for the perfect way to demonstrate her growth at the end.

Other story plotting tips

Personally, I’ve found it useful to write a list of the questions that I’ll need to work out the answer to at some point in the story. For example, a list I just rediscovered in an old notebook:

• what was Character E instructed to do by the gods? (something to do with Character A?)
• what is Character I’s role?
• what is Character U’s motive for destroying time? is she delusional rather than malicious?

It’s a good way to keep track of lingering issues and plotholes you’ve yet to fill in. If your character has killed someone but you don’t want them to be arrested, how are they going to evade the law? You can tick these questions off as you solve each problem.

In addition to your original outline – the events that are planned – it can help to keep a separate outline when you’re writing something long: the events that actually happen as you write, either chapter-by-chapter or scene-by-scene. When something significant happens that wasn’t in the original plan, or at a different point from the one in the original plan, note it down, so you won’t forget about it later on. If the hero has the revelation that his boyfriend is a were-unicorn on page 37, you don’t want him to have the same revelation again on page 105.

Finally, give yourself some flexibility. Your outline isn’t set in stone. Sometimes you’ll start writing and you’ll realise that, for example, the two characters you envisioned a romance between just don’t have much chemistry. If the story naturally seems to be heading in a different direction, it’s often worth pursuing this new path, rather than forcing the story into the shape you originally planned for it. Just make sure you keep track of what other things are going to have to change.