Today’s Shelf Life is about literary devices. Not all literary devices, there are too many to fit in one article. I am providing a curated selection of literary device advice. I’m primarily going to be talking about MacGuffins because they’re something we see all the time in storytelling, but (I find) are commonly understood. I’ll also go over two other types of plot devices the MacGuffin is often mistaken for—the red herring and Chekhov’s gun.
If you would like to read up on Chekhov’s gun specifically, I did a whole article on that particular plot device in November 2020’s An Overwhelming Abundance of Detail.
Let’s go over what a MacGuffin is, why it’s called that, what they’re used for in storytelling, and how to transform a MacGuffin into something better if find you’ve created one accidentally (and if you want to).
But first, let me say for the record: Writers don’t need to know the names for literary devices and dramatic principles to be writers. This is not necessary information. I think good writers need to understand the devices and principles, meaning, how to do the things you want to do in your story, but you don’t need to know what they’re called. The name of it doesn’t matter. If you’ve never heard of a MacGuffin before, you’ll still recognize what it is as soon as I start talking about it and you’ve probably written a few yourself. The name isn’t important. I’m just using their names to simplify the discussion and comparison. As a bonus, at the end of the article I will explain where all these names came from.
In fiction, a MacGuffin is an object, device, event, or even a character that has a purpose outside itself—it motivates the characters and moves the plot forward—but no significance or purpose in itself. Whatever the thing—the MacGuffin—is, doesn’t matter. Only its effect on the characters, which in turn causes actions and events to unfold, is important.
How can something be both important and not important? My favorite example is from Pulp Fiction (1994): The contents of Marsellus Wallace’s briefcase. Jules and Vincent killed four people to get the briefcase and return it to Marsellus Wallace. Pumpkin and Honey Bunny hold up a restaurant in broad daylight to try to take the briefcase from Jules and Vincent. What’s in the briefcase that’s so important to all these people? Nobody knows. Whatever is in there, it’s not material to the story. The audience does not need to know. The characters know, and that’s all that matters.
Moreover, you could replace it with anything else and the story would still work. Anything that had been stolen from Marsellus Wallace and that he would authorize a massacre to get back would work just as well. It could just as easily be Marsellus Wallace’s heirloom gold watch, Marsellus Wallace’s katana sword, Marsellus Wallace’s chopper, or Marsellus Wallace’s big bag of heroin.
I was talking about Chekhov’s gun recently and I stated to someone that when Chekhov’s gun fires, but was not first introduced, it is not Chekhov’s gun but a deus ex machina; and when Chekhov’s gun is introduced, but never fired, it is not Chekhov’s gun but a red herring. They asked me, “Wouldn’t that be a MacGuffin and not a red herring?” And how is Chekhov’s gun different from a MacGuffin?
A MacGuffin is the opposite of Chekhov’s gun. Chekhov’s gun is a detail that seems unimportant when it is first introduced but becomes important later in the story when it is used. A MacGuffin is central to the plot and seems important when it is first introduced, but, reflecting on the plot as a whole, you realize the item was in fact not important at all—only the characters’ reactions to it were significant. Put another way, Chekhov’s gun seems unimportant at first, but is important. A MacGuffin seems important at first, but isn’t.
Q: Is the One Ring from the Tolkien mythos a MacGuffin? There are thousands of pages devoted to nine guys just carrying the stupid thing around.
A: No. The One Ring is used for its actual, inherent purpose, both in The Hobbit (Bilbo uses it to turn invisible and escape from Gollum) and in The Lord of the Rings trilogy (Frodo and Sam both use its invisibility powers, to escape from Boromir and some orcs, respectively.
Q: Are the letters of transit from Casablanca (1942) a MacGuffin? Ilsa and Laszlo need to use them for their intended purpose to escape the Nazi occupation.
A: Yes, the letters of transit are a MacGuffin. They’re never used for their purpose as letters of transit during the film (Ilsa and Laszlo will use them when they arrive in Lisbon, after the end of the movie). They just motivate the characters who are trying to gain possession of them and set up the double (or triple?) cross.
A red herring, like a MacGuffin, seems important at first but turns out to be unimportant, but not for the same reasons a MacGuffin turns out to be unimportant.
A MacGuffin is material to the characters; it’s something they notice, think about, and base their actions upon; but it has no real meaning or significance to the audience. A red herring, on the other hand, may or may not be material to any of the characters (they may be aware of it or they may not) but it is included for the benefit of the audience as much as for the characters. A red herring is a distraction. It’s meant to draw your attention—you, the reader or viewer—to itself and away from whatever is of actual importance.
In a detective story, for example, a red herring might throw the detective off the trail along with you, the reader. In other stories, the red herring may go unnoticed by the characters but you notice it, causing you to draw a mistaken conclusion about objects, characters, or events in the story so that you may be surprised later, or will reach the correct conclusion later.
If in your story you describe a well-stocked country kitchen that includes a rifle mounted on the wall by the door; and then later, someone uses that gun to shoot someone—that rifle is Chekhov’s gun: A seemingly unimportant detail that becomes important later.
If in your story you draw the reader’s attention to the rifle mounted on the wall by the door such that they don’t pay attention to the butcher knife on the table, and that butcher knife turns out to be the real murder weapon, then the rifle is a red herring: An inconsequent detail that distracts from the consequent detail.
If in your story you describe a rifle mounted on the wall by the door of a family home, a rifle that has been passed down father to son for generations, and is now the cause of a vicious legal battle between two brothers who both believe they should have inherited the gun after their father’s death, then the rifle is a MacGuffin. It motivates the characters’ actions to drive the plot forward, but it’s not used as a gun, that is, to shoot anything or anyone.
If a character who has no reason to have a gun, and has never been described anywhere near a gun, let alone in possession of one, suddenly pulls a rifle out from under their trench coat in the climax of your novel because there’s no other way for the good guys to prevail in the final conflict, then the gun is a deus ex machina. An unsatisfying, unexplained, unlikely lucky coincidence to the rescue.
Chekhov’s gun is great literary device to use. It’s an excellent method of foreshadowing and, done well, the payoff is usually satisfying.
Red herrings are good when they are inserted deliberately to distract or mislead the reader; but be cautious of creating inadvertent red herrings with no payoff by hinting at something, for instance, and then never following through. A red herring should always have some kind of explanation for why it was there—it ought not be left an open question at the end (eg, “but if so-and-so did it after all, then we never found out whose fingerprints were those at the scene of the crime!”).
Dei ex machina are universally bad to use unless you really, really know what you’re doing and you’re out to subvert the rules of good storytelling in an interesting way. An unlikely stroke of fortune or convenience, an unlooked-for saving grace that the writer didn’t lay groundwork for, is almost always an unsatisfying conclusion for the reader. If you can’t resolve your plot with the things already in your story, don’t add something new in to resolve it at the point of the climax. Figure out what you need and then go back to the start and build out the foundation.
What about MacGuffins? They’re neither good, nor bad—although I think of them as somewhat out of fashion in contemporary storytelling (though I may be proven wrong). If, based on what you’ve learned today, you’ve got a MacGuffin in your story, decide whether you’re happy with that as it is or if you want to un-MacGuffinate it.
If you want to—that ridiculous thing I just wrote—evaluate what the item is and figure out how it can be used for it’s meaningful purpose in the context of your story. Maybe you can’t find an actual use for the item: For instance, think of the Heart of the Ocean from Titanic (1997)—what can you use a big blue gem for, really? If the item truly has no usefulness in your story, then it probably doesn’t matter what it is. Can you swap it out for something that is meaningful to the characters in the same way but can be used for its intended purpose in the story?
For instance, if Jules opened Marsellus Wallace’s briefcase in Brett’s apartment and he was like “aha, it’s Marsellus Wallace’s missing favorite gun!” and then pulled the gun from the briefcase and shot Brett with it, then the contents of the briefcase would no longer be a MacGuffin.
That’s not what was in there, though. For what it’s worth, I think Marsellus Wallace’s briefcase contains the diamonds from the Reservoir Dogs (1992) heist, themselves the MacGuffin of their own film. The coveted double MacGuffin.
You’ll never guess what they call a Double MacGuffin with cheese in France.
Before I sign off, as promised, here’s where all these literary terms get their names.
Chekhov’s gun is named after playwright Anton Chekhov’s often-repeated assertion that (to paraphrase), “if there is a gun hanging on the wall in act 1 it must go off by the end of act 3.”
Deus ex machina (god from the machine) is named for the plot device often used in Classical Greek drama wherein the characters, unable to resolve the plot at the climax of the play, are suddenly joined by an actor playing a god who is lowered down from the rafters using a pulley system (the machine) to solve their problem for them and end the play.
MacGuffin is named for an Alfred Hitchcock quote on the subject (I pulled the direct quote from Wikipedia):
“It might be a Scottish name, taken from a story about two men on a train. One man says, ‘What’s that package up there in the baggage rack?’ And the other answers, ‘Oh, that's a MacGuffin.’ The first one asks, ‘What's a MacGuffin?’ ‘Well,’ the other man says, ‘it’s an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands.’ The first man says, ‘But there are no lions in the Scottish Highlands,’ and the other one answers, ‘Well then, that’s no MacGuffin!’ So you see that a MacGuffin is actually nothing at all.”
Red herring is named after the practice of training scent hounds to follow a trail. As I understand it, trainers take smelly fish (like pickled herring) and drag them across the scent trail of the prey the hounds were set on in order to distract them and lead them off the trail. A skilled hound—like a skilled detective or a careful reader!—can resist the enticing herring smell and stay on the real trail.
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