Rain Falling on Chekhov's Gun

Short Story Form and Breaking Your Own Rules

Perhaps the most famous aphorism about storytelling comes from Anton Chekhov. Apparently he gave a version of his gun advice in multiple letters. The most poetic iteration mentions promises: “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off. It's wrong to make promises you don't mean to keep.”

The master short story writer’s maxim has a number of different meanings. It’s been taken as a reminder to set things up early on in a story, and also as a heuristic for how to cut out superfluous elements. The latter is what Chekhov himself apparently meant in the “promises” version of the quote, which came in a critique of a fellow playwright’s work.

Chekhov’s Gun also has more structural significance: Sometimes all you need is the perfect loaded gun to make an entire narrative hit its mark. If you ask the right dramatic question—Will this gun go off, and why would it matter if it did?—you might achieve the perfect dramatic answer. And then your fight, as a writer, is mostly over. Victory with a single shot.

Lately I’ve realized that I don’t really know how to write short stories. I’ve written one or two that are solid, mostly by creating a character or pair of characters who were interesting and intuitively stumbling into a story arc that brings out what’s compelling about them. I’ve also written dozens of short stories that don’t really work. They may be competent, unembarrassing to submit to a workshop. They may even carry within them the seed of a promising longer piece—which is what I mostly care about, anyway. But they don’t succeed as stories, because short stories are supposed to be perfect.

Few stories actually are perfect, of course, but they feel like they should be because they could be. Poems and stories can be perfect in the way a sunset or a kiss can be. Novels, on the other hand, are for those of us determined to ramble forward imperfectly, as if walking through an unfamiliar trail in the woods, trying to savor the moment even as we realize we’re developing a blister and getting hungry.

We could return to Chekhov’s Gun for another metaphor. If novels are messy, confusing battles, then short stories are often more like duels: One good shot can often settle the matter.

I’ve spent a lot of words explaining the fairly familiar principle of Chekhov’s Gun, because I wanted to clarify for myself what it meant. Initially I set out to write about how writers load the gun, but then I actually read a short story by the man himself. Now I want to talk about how Chekhov keeps his power dry in a story of his that I read for the first time tonight.

Gooseberries is the first story in what’s been called Chekhov’s “Little Trilogy,” three linked stories featuring the same characters. In the opening story, two old men walk along a country lane on an overcast day that takes its time yielding rain:

From early morning the sky had been overcast with clouds; the day was still, cool, and wearisome, as usual on grey, dull days when the clouds hang low over the fields and it looks like rain, which never comes. Ivan Ivanich, the veterinary surgeon, and Bourkin, the schoolmaster, were tired of walking and the fields seemed endless to them. Far ahead they could just see the windmills of the village of Mirousky, to the right stretched away to disappear behind the village a line of hills, and they knew that it was the bank of the river; meadows, green willows, farmhouses; and from one of the hills there could be seen a field as endless, telegraph ­posts, and the train, looking from a distance like a crawling caterpillar, and in clear weather even the town. In the calm weather when all Nature seemed gentle and melancholy, Ivan Ivanich and Bourkin were filled with love for the fields and thought how grand and beautiful the country was.

"Last time, when we stopped in Prokofyi's shed," said Bourkin, "you were going to tell me a story."

"Yes. I wanted to tell you about my brother."

Ivan Ivanich took a deep breath and lighted his pipe before beginning his story, but just then the rain began to fall. And in about five minutes it came pelting down and showed no signs of stopping. Ivan Ivanich stopped and hesitated; the dogs, wet through, stood with their tails between their legs and looked at them mournfully.

"We ought to take shelter," said Bourkin. "Let us go to Aliokhin. It is close by."

Note that these are two men who do not, in the beginning, have any wish to be involved in a story. One day I’ll write a magisterial essay about the difference between fictional characters who actively want to be involved in a story (Ishmael, Julien Sorel, Emma Woodhouse) and those who have to be dragged into one (Tess Durbyfield, Leopold Bloom, Donald Gately). For now, let’s agree that Ivan and Bourkin are just trying to have a nice stroll.

Land-owner Aliokhin greets Ivan and Bourkin and offers them a hot bath and a bed. They admire his unusually long hair and gawk at his beautiful young housekeeper, Pelagea.

Finally, Ivan tells Bourkin and Aliokhin the story of his brother. Nikolai grew up in the countryside, and always wanted to live there. But he became a government official, living in the city, fantasizing about owning a farm, and saving as much as he could to buy one. Then he got his farm and became unassailably happy in a way that terrified his brother. There’s a long soliloquy about this, but you should read the whole story to get that.

Gooseberries ends with everyone going to bed unsatisfied:

Aliokhin wanted very much to go to bed; he had to get up for his work very early, about two in the morning, and now his eyes were closing, but he was afraid of his guests saying something interesting without his hearing it, so he would not go. He did not trouble to think whether what Ivan Ivanich had been saying was clever or right; his guests were talking of neither groats, nor hay, nor tar, but of something which had no bearing on his life, and he liked it and wanted them to go on. . . .

"However, it's time to go to bed," said Bourkin, getting up. "I will wish you good night."

Aliokhin said good night and went down­stairs, and left his guests. Each had a large room with an old wooden bed and carved ornaments; in the corner was an ivory crucifix; and their wide, cool beds, made by pretty Pelagea, smelled sweetly of clean linen.

Ivan Ivanich undressed in silence and lay down.

"God forgive me, a wicked sinner," he murmured, as he drew the clothes over his head.

A smell of burning tobacco came from his pipe which lay on the table, and Bourkin could not sleep for a long time and was worried because he could not make out where the unpleasant smell came from.

The rain beat against the windows all night long

After the big speech, the characters go to bed, and castigate themselves, and fret over tobacco smells. It rains. And that’s how the story ends.

No gun was ever loaded, no gun ever went off. The story within the story can’t even be a neat parable because it’s so deeply embedded in the messiness of a completely believable reality. At no point did I have a sense of what any of the characters wanted that was more profound than “would prefer not to be rained on” or “would like to go to bed.” Chekhov wrote a compelling story that could easily have occurred to real people, which is perhaps the hardest thing to do as a short story writer.

So here we are, with one of the most revered short stories ever written. It feels , even as it doesn’t have any comfortably explainable component parts. Maybe that’s what literary perfection ultimately is—irreducibly strange and achingly familiar. The rain is still beating against those windows.

As I said last week, perhaps what I admire most about great writers is how much they get away with. At least in this case, Chekhov pays no attention to his legendary maxim. The rest of us fools get to do the shooting.

A request

I’d like to try something new: Answering reader questions! If you have questions within the general “how stories work” remit of this newsletter, or just things you think I’m suited to answer, please drop them in the comments. I’ll try to address as many as possible in the next couple of weeks. I may do a dedicated Q+A letter next week, or the week after that. But this could take many forms depending on how it shakes out. Thanks!

Calvin and Hobbes Corner

Sometimes when you come home, you realize you left a part of yourself out in the wilds:

To recap, Calvin seceded from his family, tried to go on an adventure to the Yukon, got into a power struggle with Hobbes, and is now back at home. Except Hobbes hasn’t made it back. And now it’s bedtime, the end of all things.

Calvin and Hobbes is about a lot of things, several of which I’ve already addressed in this space. But its most accessible, enduring theme might be friendship. It’s a story about an ornery, defiant, imaginative kid and his friend, a metaphysically unstable yet ever-stalwart tiger. Without Hobbes, Calvin is shouting into a darkened room. Come to think of it, Calvin would probably love Twitter, but I’m not here to scare you.

So to avoid the fate of the darkened room, Calvin rushes out into the bigger dark. Again defiant, having just made up with his once-disavowed mom only a few hours earlier, Calvin knows his duty to Hobbes supersedes the rules of God and man. I guess “find someone who needs you as much as Calvin needs Hobbes” is probably not advice therapists would endorse, but hey, you could probably do worse.

A poem

Matt Rasmussen loads the gun