Silver Stars

A question I think about sometimes for writing projects is 'what is the minimum viable chekov's gun?'. Like, if you conspicuously put the proverbial gun on the mantlepiece in act 1, what's the least use you can put it to that will pay it off? Can you put the proverbial gun on the mantlepiece and pay that off without firing it? Without anyone getting shot? Not necessarily in a subversive way ('haha! the gun is loaded with blanks!' or 'haha! the gun isn't loaded, but a secret message from the wife's lover is concealed in one of the chambers!') but in a way where someone noticing, picking up, interacting with the gun pays off something significantly less dramatic than violence or the threat of violence?

Today I'm thinking about this in the context of alien megastructures, which apparently I'm just coming up with as settings for everything these days. If I have a story set in a cool alien megastructure because that's a cool place to put a story, how little can I get away with explaining or revealing about the alien megastructure and have it still be enough that people feel the alien megastructure is more than just set dressing

Idle thoughts, conversation starter, tell me about cool books/plays/stories that have deflationary payoffs (which, I guess, implicitly there's a spoiler risk in the comments, I don't mind being spoiled on stuff but I know some people do)

I second the comment suggesting thematic relevance; whenever I need or want to include a certain scene, conversation, character, etc, but need to "pad it out" somehow so that it doesn't feel sparse or out of place, I ask myself "how can I make this thing reinforce the theme?" Or, "how can I use this to support the characterization of my protagonist, the people around them, or the world they live in?"

According to the theory of Chekhov's Gun, every story element should have an answer to the question, "why was this included?". Sometimes the reason is to set up a more specific question, and sometimes it's to answer a question – like Chekhov's loaded gun, which asks "when will this be shot?" and may later answer "how will this violent conflict end?" Personally, I think "because I thought it would be fun" is often a good enough answer, because entertainment is the whole point of much media in the first place. But the more reasons you have to include an element, the more efficient, effective, and interesting the element is.

As @garak said, the alien megastructure could contribute to a theme of "living in the shadow of something large and unknowable, or completely alien". Another theme could be "being a small part of something much larger than you", either for good, like contributing to an underground resistance, unable to see the full effects of your actions but praying that your piece is helping to make a difference; or for ill, like being a cog in a capitalist machine that will grind you up and then keep going. There's also "being trapped in a maze of options" or "an emptiness so large that nothing could ever fill it up" or "who cares about the big things, honestly, it's the little close things that matter" or "stop blocking out the world and leave your comfort zone for once already". Or even a couple of these themes on top of each other!

The megastructure could contribute to characterization. Maybe the protag's mom is so controlling because she grew up somewhere much smaller, and in this big mysterious place she can't help but try to carve out a home that is hers to know and control in its entirety. Maybe a best friend's plot-contributing technical skills were learned during their work maintaining the megastructure's anti-gravity lines. Maybe the government is prone to excess, huge flashy projects that don't actually might life better – or maybe it used to be capable of such great vital good but is currently too scattered and polarized to muster the effort.

Some questions the megastructure could ask or answer: "Who built it? Why was it built, and is it still fulfilling that role? Why do people live in it now? How does it affect day-to-day life? What is it made out of, and where did those resources come from? Do people still have access to the level of technology/resources/labor necessary for such a project? If not, why not? What do the people who live here know about and think about aliens? How do people travel? Where do they work and where do they live, what are their jobs and their hobbies? Why are these people here, either in general, or the specific characters we're focusing on?" And any of those answers could then, in turn, be relevant to theme or characterization or plot or more questions and answers.

It's hard to say where the line is, of how much of this you need... When I'm reading a story, I'm happy to see any kinda cool shit, even if it's fairly irrelevant – though I'd be disappointed if a cool thing was mentioned, but then I didn't get to actually see any of its coolness. But I do also find it extremely satisfying when story elements become relevant over and over again, in different ways, from different angles, asking or answering new questions each time, punching you in the gut with renewed significance and context.

So I suppose my answer would be: If you want to put something really cool in the story then fucking put it in there, no matter what - but keep an eye out for opportunities to tie it in to the rest of the story and do so wherever you can, whether that ends up being only once or twice, or in new ways every single scene. It's just even more cool that way!

A question I think about sometimes for writing projects is 'what is the minimum viable chekov's gun?'. Like, if you conspicuously put the proverbial gun on the mantlepiece in act 1, what's the least use you can put it to that will pay it off? Can you put the proverbial gun on the mantlepiece and pay that off without firing it? Without anyone getting shot? Not necessarily in a subversive way ('haha! the gun is loaded with blanks!' or 'haha! the gun isn't loaded, but a secret message from the wife's lover is concealed in one of the chambers!') but in a way where someone noticing, picking up, interacting with the gun pays off something significantly less dramatic than violence or the threat of violence?

Today I'm thinking about this in the context of alien megastructures, which apparently I'm just coming up with as settings for everything these days. If I have a story set in a cool alien megastructure because that's a cool place to put a story, how little can I get away with explaining or revealing about the alien megastructure and have it still be enough that people feel the alien megastructure is more than just set dressing

Idle thoughts, conversation starter, tell me about cool books/plays/stories that have deflationary payoffs (which, I guess, implicitly there's a spoiler risk in the comments, I don't mind being spoiled on stuff but I know some people do)

This is a very interesting question.

It's difficult to answer as a general abstract; the minimum use you can a put a particular thing to depends on its specific affordances. Chekov's gun can be used to shoot someone or something; to threaten; to bolster, claim or overturn authority; to change the power dynamics of a situation; as a object of value with those capabilities with which to trade. Chekov's hat, say, does not share all of those.

On the other hand, there's clearly a sense in which "change the power dynamics of a situation" is subtler than "shoot someone". The gun can change a situation simply because everyone becomes aware it's there — or because some, even just one character becomes aware of it!

Some early whodunnit-type detective novels apparently had endnotes, detailing clue-by-clue exactly where in the text particular information became available to the detective, so that the interested reader could double-check for themselves that the mystery was fairly solvable — that they themselves could have with the information given. And while the information presentation in those types of story perhaps verges on adverserial, I think there's a worthwhile point to be gleaned there: that it's possible to get too subtle. Chekov's gun is graspable because it's fired; if the gun's consequences become too abstracted from the fact of its firearm quiddity, is it still Chekov's?

i think a discussion like this risks getting caught up too much in the nature of the mechanism and not the nature of what it is meant to metaphorically gesture towards as a concept. (this is perhaps inevitable given that OP is a philosopher. love you dear.)

which is to say - "chekhov's gun" refers to an oft-repeated piece of advice anton chekhov would give to young playwrights, which is typically shortened to something like "if you put a gun on the mantelpiece in the first act, it must be fired by the third" or something like that. this is actually an oveersimplification of the advice chekhov usually gave, which has the neat and unfortunate effect of subtly derailing the point of the advice as it was typically given, not unlike the way people quoting strunk & white's "omit needless words" or another, similar piece of advice, "show, don't tell" do a disservice to both those ideas, thanks to their own preconceived biases as to what the advice means.

because at the end of the day they all mean the same thing. chekhov's best articulation of this principle was "do not load a rifle on stage if it's not meant to be fired later on; writers must not make promises we don't intend to keep."

emphasis on the latter. in other words, if you put something in front of the reader's attention, then you'd better damn well know what reason you had for putting it there and your narrative had better be one that tried to vindicate it. that's all it means. chekhov gave this advice to student playwrights, specifically, because it was meant to help teach them to consider what their play structures really needed, what the purpose of their dialogues, actions, set directions really were about - because, much like many a modern writer, inexperienced hands would often get lost in the details of their narrative to the point that they would stymie their own ability to write the narrative they wanted to be writing in the first place.

this is what the typical simplification of his advice loses. chekhov explicitly called attention to the act of a loaded gun within the narrative because that was an act of intent on the writer's part, to create a narrative beat by directing their character to load the gun; called attention to the act of that loaded gun being placed upon the mantle or other such surface as an act of intentional delay on the writer's part, to then create tension in the audience have directed their character(s) to leave that narrative beat incomplete and set aside, due to the audience's expectation and/or awareness of the nature of the narrative beat in question, in this case a "loaded gun".

the reason chekhov tells these student playwrights that the "loaded" gun must go off later in the play is to get them to think about if they should've put in that scene that effectively forced their characters to have loaded it, if they're all, writer included, just going to forget it's there two acts later because the gun wasn't truly tied to any part of the rest of the story in the first place. a story that loads a literal gun early on, knowing that the payoff is that the literal gun was never going to be fired, is still a story that follows chekhov's advice. because it has, still, fired the metaphorical gun it intended to - it has still respected the audience's time and anticipation, it has still resolved the problem its writer understood they'd created. and there is no degree of narrative scrutiny too small, and no satisfaction too minor, that can't be paid off by a writer who cares about why they put that detail in the story as much, if not more, than what that detail is in the first place.

reducing the advice down to simply "if there's a gun on the mantlepiece in the first act, it should go off in the third" makes it altogether too easy to get hung up on the metaphorical mechanism of the gun and extrapolate from that part of the aphorism, instead of the advice chekhov was trying to impart - which is that the easy part of the joke's the setup - the part that takes practice is timing the punchline.