Connect Promises to Payoffs

A letter from Chekhov of 1 November 1889 to Aleksandr Lazarev (who wrote under the pen name Gruzinsky) is cited as saying that one must not put a loaded rifle on the stage if no one is thinking of firing it. Reminiscences by Ilya Gurlyand, published in 1904, and by Sergei Shchukin, published in 1911, give the idea in different words, with the gun hanging on the wall in the first act. None of the versions is as tidy as the legend. Under all of them sits the idea that you should avoid promises you do not mean to keep, whatever object carries them.

The rule can harden into a mechanism, and Hemingway, in a lecture-preface unpublished in his lifetime, mocks it. He calls untrue the idea, which he attributes to what students are taught, that a gun hanging on the wall at the start must be fired by a certain page; the chances are, he says, that it will not even shoot, and it may be there because someone liked to look at it. That is a joke by a writer who prized omission, and it deserves a serious answer. A detail that pays nothing is not a fault in itself, since texture seems to keep a world from feeling like a mechanism. The fault is a detail given the weight of a promise, held, lit, handled, and then dropped.

In the second act of The Seagull (Marian Fell’s translation), Konstantin Treplev walks onstage with a gun and a dead gull and lays the bird at Nina’s feet. “So shall I soon end my own life,” he says. The play turns to other matters. At the end of the fourth act a shot is heard from the next room while the company sits down to lotto. Dr. Dorn goes to look, returns, and says a flask of ether has exploded. A moment later he draws Trigorin aside and whispers the truth, that Treplev has shot himself. The payoff arrives as sound, is explained away, and is then confirmed.

A promise that nothing pays leaves the reader with loose threads, and a payoff nothing promised feels like a trick. A reader probably keeps open every question a work raises without deciding to, so a dropped one registers as a gap and an unplanted payoff as an arbitrary event.

A promise is anything the work introduces that creates an expectation, from an object or a threat to a convention of genre, a title, or a memoir’s implied “I will tell you how I came to this.” The payoff is the work’s answer. It may reward, giving the reader what was expected, or complicate, giving it with a cost or a twist, or overturn, giving the opposite and making the reader reread the promise.

Three Sisters (Julius West’s translation) overturns. The sisters’ longing for Moscow is spoken in the first act, and by the third Irina is begging to be taken there. They never go. The play ends with Olga’s cry, “If only we could know,” and the three of them resolving to live and work without knowing why. The promise is paid by non-payment, and what it complicates is the audience’s sense of what the promise was for.

In “Silver Blaze” Arthur Conan Doyle hides a setup in plain view. The curious incident of the dog in the night-time is introduced as an aside, and Holmes later explains that the visitor must have been someone the dog knew. The reader was given the clue in the open and not told what it was for.

A planner keeps a ledger of promises as the book grows. J. K. Rowling’s hand-drawn chart for Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, from 2001 and shown at the British Library in 2017, lists day, month, plot, and prophecy among its headings, which puts the calendar and the plot in one grid, the form the ledger below takes. A discovery writer can build the same ledger after the draft, from the page as it stands. Either way a setup and its payoff can sit chapters apart, and a row puts them side by side. (Chapter 5 treats such links across a whole Work.)

Practice. Make a ledger with four columns: what is introduced and where; what expectation it creates; where it pays, or why it deliberately does not; and what the payoff does, rewarding, complicating, or overturning. Work through a chapter, or twenty scenes. A finished row should read like Treplev’s: dead gull in act two, shot in the next room in act four. Mark every promise nobody keeps and every payoff nobody set up, and for each, decide whether to cut it, pay it, or move it. An hour is enough for a first pass.