Gun on the wall

I don’t own a gun, I’m not a playwright, and I don’t know all that much about Chekhov. But I do know he supposedly said this:

“Remove everything that has no relevance to the story. 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.”

Or, in my vacuum-shrunk version:

“Don’t bring up the gun if you ain’t gonna shoot it.”

Even when I’m not writing anything creative, even when there’s no story to tell or scene to write, I often put the rifle on the wall. And too often, it ends up not doing anything.

Instead of racing into something, I’d be much better off taking the time to work out where I’m headed—make myself look at every detail not as something to get done, but as part of a composite problem, something with a beginning, middle, and end. Something like a story.

Before I plod through a task (like, say, manually entering data on a 1000+ cell spreadsheet), I should figure out what exactly I want from it: what I want to accomplish, what this action is doing to get there. That way, I wouldn’t spend an hour finding out it wasn’t necessary. I’d only spend a minute.

I can have all the speed in the world to finish things, but the advantage gets neutralized the moment I use it to complete something extraneous.

I should figure out that rifles are no good when you don’t need to shoot anything.