Writing influenced
by Chekhov

Every short story writer is working in Chekhov’s shadow, whether they know it or not. He invented the modern short story not by establishing rules but by discarding them. He discarded plot as the engine of fiction. He discarded resolution as the purpose of the story. He replaced both with something subtler and more true: the moment that reveals, without resolving, without concluding.

The indirect method

Chekhov’s indirect method: the story does not move toward its subject. It moves around it. A story about loneliness is not a story in which characters say they are lonely or in which the narrator describes their loneliness. It is a story in which the most ordinary interactions reveal the loneliness from the inside, through the texture of what is not said.

The most precise example is “Misery,” in which a cabdriver wants to tell someone that his son has died. He tries to tell several passengers. None of them listen. By the end of the story he tells his horse. The story is about the impossibility of making your grief legible to other people. Chekhov never says this. He shows the repeated failure of connection, specifically and without comment. The reader understands exactly what the story is about, and Chekhov has never named it.

This is harder than it sounds. The direct method is easier because it is visible. The indirect method requires the writer to trust that the reader will see what is not shown directly, that the accumulation of detail and behaviour will create understanding without explanation. Most writers do not yet have this trust. The indirect method is a method to work toward.

Subtext in dialogue

Chekhov’s dialogue is the model for all serious dialogue in short fiction. His characters do not say what they mean. They say something else, and the gap between what they say and what they mean is where the drama lives. Two characters discuss the weather. They are actually discussing their marriage. The reader feels both conversations simultaneously.

This is subtext. It is not code or symbolism. It is the way people actually talk when something important is at stake. People do not say: “I am afraid this relationship is over.” They say: “It’s getting late,” and reach for their coat. The task of the writer is to construct the scene so that both statements are present: the one that is said and the one that is felt.

The craft of subtext is the craft of knowing what the character cannot say and then constructing the situation so that the unsaid thing is present. This requires understanding the character’s psychology completely before writing their dialogue. The character speaks from their psychology, not from the writer’s need to convey information.

The scene that changes nothing and everything

Chekhov’s endings are famously inconclusive. Nothing is resolved. The characters do not reach understanding. The situation does not change. And yet the reader finishes the story with the sensation that something significant has happened. Gurov’s realisation in “The Lady with the Dog” that he is, in spite of everything, capable of love. The student’s sudden recognition of the continuity of human suffering across centuries. These are interior movements with no exterior consequence, and they are everything.

These endings work because Chekhov has made the interior movement of a character visible through exterior detail. Nothing changes in the world of the story. Everything changes in the reader’s understanding of that world. This is what Chekhov means by the moment that reveals: the instant in which the reader sees what the character cannot quite see.

The lesson for endings: the story does not need to arrive at resolution. It needs to arrive at truth. A character moving closer to self-knowledge, even if they will not act on it, is a complete story. The reader does not require the character to change. They require only the sense that something real has been seen.

What Chekhov teaches flash fiction writers

Resist resolution. Trust the detail over the statement. Trust the reader to feel the subtext without being told it is there. Know that the indirect method requires a complete, fully realised knowledge of the direct subject before you can successfully avoid it. And read the late stories, particularly “The Lady with the Dog,” “The Bishop,” and “The Student,” for a lesson in endings that are inconclusive and yet complete.

Read these first:

“Chekhov is the hardest influence to absorb because what he teaches is almost entirely negative: don’t explain, don’t conclude, don’t approach the subject directly. What you’re left with, once you’ve stopped doing all of those things, is the story.”

— David, Tumbleweed Words