Every writer, instinctively or otherwise, understands the notion of payoffs. This relates to Chekov’s gun. If you mention something, provide closure.
I understand this, too, but life rarely provides closure. Perhaps this is why we want our stories to play this role, everything in neat bundles, strings tied, a nice ribbon.
The challenge as a writer is how to subvert this expectation without alienating your audience.
“Wait, what happened to that character?”
“Why did that mention the purple cow?”
And so on.
To many, these are called out as plot holes. To be fair, many are; some are forgotten plotlines, and others are simply abandoned.
But what if some are intentional? What if the plot better reflected real life? What if you never heard about that man on the tube or that woman at the grocery?
How many people do you pass by, never to encounter again? How many people do you cross paths with only to, years later, befriend.
In principle, I may have run into my wife a decade before I met her. We trod the same ground and frequented the same neighbourhoods.
A narrator may be able to piece this together, but I’ll never know. It’s like when you buy a car that you don’t see often – but then you do – or after you befriend a person, you notice them often.
In a way, a story pulls pieces together and creates narrative threads, but what if it didn’t?
Ridley Park 