Chekhov's gun

Chekhov's gun is Anton Chekhov's dramatic principle that every element in a story should be necessary and irrelevant elements should be removed. He put it several ways: "One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn't going to go off" (letter, 1889), and, as recorded by Shchukin, "If you say in the first act that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third act it absolutely must go off." A modern secondary sense names the planted element itself: a plot detail introduced early whose significance only becomes clear later.

For novelists the principle is setup and payoff: what you plant, you fire; what you fire, you planted. In a web serial it bites harder, because chapters are published before any whole-book revision exists, so an accidental gun cannot be quietly removed later. The deliberate exception is the red herring, a detail planted precisely so it will mislead. Hemingway mocked the rule, and Chekhov's own The Cherry Orchard hangs two firearms that never fire, so treat it as an economy principle rather than a law.