“The gun must fire.” So said Anton Chekhov, the Russian author of many famous short stories, including “Three Sisters” and “The Cherry Orchard.” Chekhov was talking about effective fiction writing when he exclaimed, “If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off. If it's not going to be fired, it shouldn't be hanging there.”
Elaborating, Chekhov explained