Good worldbuilding is often less about what you choose to show your audience, and more what you choose to withhold.
To see why, let’s start with The Empire Strikes Back, and the scene where Han visits Luke to see how he’s recovering after getting beasted by an ice creature. While the scene is famous for Luke enjoying a quick hospital makeout with the woman who turns out to be his sister, to me it’s more significant for Han’s throwaway line “you look strong enough to pull the ears off a gundark”.
Because while it is just that – a throwaway line – it doubles as a really fuel-efficient piece of worldbuilding. Not only does it tell us there is some hardcore monster called a gundark out there, but that it’s well known enough to have formed the basis of a folk idiom akin to “raining cats and dogs” or “I could eat a horse”.
It’s something Star Wars does particularly well. From the ships that are grimy from a hundred other adventures, to the broke-ass muppets lurking in the back of a space pub, it constantly suggests there’s a whole world just beyond the edge of the screen – a galaxy of wonders, glimpsed in flashes as we follow just a few participants through it.
Strange things are constantly referred to, both visually and textually, but never fully fleshed out. They give us the idea we are looking into something larger, rather than being performed to by the inhabitants of a pocket universe which we can see in its entirety, and which has been created solely to tell this story. Faced with so many unanswered questions, we are compelled to populate the space beyond the screen with our imagination.
But of course, strictly speaking, this is bad storytelling. At least according to Russian genius Anton Chekhov, who repeatedly used the metaphor of a loaded gun to warn against superfluity in narrative. “One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off” he wrote to a correspondent in 1889. “It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.”
I don’t want to make a straw man of Chekhov’s point for the sake of looking clever, because in context it’s completely valid. For a start, he was a writer of plays and short fiction, where the rules of narrative economy are particularly tight. Furthermore, it would be arguing in bad faith to treat his statement literally, as an attack on unused props. In this instance, he was using the gun as a metaphor for a monologue in his correspondent’s play, which he deemed unrelated to the rest of the story.
In fact, if there’s anything in Empire Strikes Back that would have pissed him off, it would have been the Luke/Leia kiss, which does nothing in the wider story of the trilogy than make Luke and Leia seem… well, a bit Game of Thrones.
Chekhov’s rule – of only introducing things in a story which will fulfill a vital narrative purpose – is a good one, but it’s also one that is worth consciously bending in SFF narratives. When writing in fantastic worlds, there’s a huge benefit to be drawn from making promises you can’t keep: by constantly hinting at things that will never be fully explained. So let’s put Chekhov aside, and place loaded guns – and gundarks – all over the stage.
Indeed, SFF writing can feel empty or lonely if it doesn’t do this. If everything that populates the universe is used during the course of the story, we are left with the sense that nothing of the world persists when the camera switches off. If we only take out the toys we need, then carefully pack them back in at the end of playtime, we’re not having much fun.
Of course in a piece of literary fiction (that generic term we use to describe stories set in the real world, but which aren’t about crime or cowboys), a writer can be more economical – they don’t need to include too many details from outside the bubble of perspective, as the reader already know what’s there. But in worlds we have invented ourselves, we need those details. They are architectural supports; buttresses which curve in out of the unknowable to help suspend our disbelief.
There is still a right and a wrong way to deploy Chekhov’s Gundark. If a promise to the reader is unkeepable, you should let them know that a taste is all they’re getting, by keeping the inference brief. Han doesn’t give us the impression that gundarks are anything we’re going to need to worry about over the course of the movie – he’s just making a casual remark.
Indeed, the device only works at all if it involves a calculated lack of description – if every hint at the wider world comes with an infodump explaining it to the reader, immersion can be quickly destroyed. Imagine if Han had said “you look strong enough to pull the ears off a gundark. You know, those six-legged apes we’ve been having so much trouble with during the star wars. Crikey, I hope they don’t come back to eat any more of our crystals!”
And of course, the best way to use Chekhov’s Gundark is to deploy it in the spirit of Chekhov himself, and put your worldbuilding to work in building up your characters’ story. In making the gundark remark, Han is not just dropping a monster name – he’s using a folksy saying to big up his friend, and so its extraneity is redeemed.
The living masters of this style of worldbuilding are writers like Jeff VanderMeer and China Mieville; their work swarms with gundarks, leaving the reader with a sense of having taken just one route through a labyrinth of possible stories. In Mieville’s Bas-lag books in particular, one gets the sense that even the author doesn’t know the full details of the sprawling histories he invokes, generating an almost reckless sense of wonder.
Achieving this technique can be harder than balancing the saddle on an Atlassian Pithecus, but if you get it right, it can offer twice the thrill.
Nate Crowley lives in Walsall, near the big IKEA. A compulsive world builder, he is the author of The Death and Life of Schneider Wrack as well as the celebrated Daniel Barker’s Birthday. Nate is currently working on a text adventure about a haunted sales training manual called Big Mike Lunchtime’s Business Training ‘95, as well as the animated series Realms of Fightinge, and a new novel. You can find him as @Frogcroakley on twitter, where he is apparently worth a follow if you’re into that sort of thing.
Fine essay, I hope ‘Checkov’s Gundark’ soon become a standard phrase in the discussions of speculative writing. I am sharing links to this whereever I can.