Of course, novels can afford more stage dressing than, er, stages, but even so, if you specifically draw the reader’s attention to a gun over the fireplace-well, you don’t actually have to fire it. This is why fiction is more satisfying than life: it’s not full of unnecessary clutter. Chekhov’s Gun is the law of loose ends, and it says, basically, if you dress your set with a gun hanging over the mantelpiece, someone had better bloody fire it.īut KJ, you say, some houses just have decorative firearms! Is every gun hanging over a fireplace fired in reality? Of course not. I will here deploy one of the two big weapons in the editing arsenal: Chekhov’s Gun. It is something that makes us say, ‘Hang on, what about…?’ It’s unsatisfactory because the author has brought something to our attention, and not dealt with it.įirst, identify them. What constitutes an actual loose end? I would say it’s a character whose fate the reader feels they have been set up to expect (someone we like left without resolution, someone we hate left unpunished), or a mystery that will be forever unexplained, or a problem that’s been set up with no solution offered. Those things are dangling threads left for future works rather than loose ends. And, crucially, the lack of resolution there doesn’t impact the MCs’ happy ending at all. However, I did so with a big neon signpost indicating FUTURE MYSTERY-INVESTIGATION HERE, giving the reader the clear nod that it isn’t forgotten about. I left a whacking great unsolved mystery at the end of Secret Lives of Country Gentlemen because it’s a plot driver for the second book of the duology.

In a romance series, a major secondary character’s problems may well just have to fester through two or three novels until it’s their turn to be the MC. Just to get it out of the way: Sometimes we leave things unresolved on purpose. How do you approach tying up loose ends at the end of a book? This one is from Lis Paice, who always brings the good questions. I just finished a book (writing one, not reading one, that would be less impressive) and while on the scrounge for anything to do except start my new one, I asked for blog post ideas.

Jackdaw kj charles