Red herring is the concept of finding fake clues that mislead you. The opposite of that is Checkhov’s Gun. This is a concept in literature that states that “every element in a story must be necessary, and irrelevant elements should be removed.”
Checkhov’s Gun is essentially just foreshadowing but it also drives the story. For example, in The Lottery by Shirley Jackson, it’s about a tradition that is is having a lottery to see who gets stoned to death. The children had “stuffed [their] pockets full of stones [and] eventually made a great pile of stones in one corner of the square.”(Jackson) This is foreshadowing what will happen towards to end of the book. However, if a reader was reading this story for the first time, he/she probably won’t care much about the stones and continue reading. The stones could also not even be important to the story. However, with Checkhov’s Gun, these stones need to have a purpose in the story, not just be a random object.
Another story that follows the Checkhov’s Gun concept is The Astonishing Color of After by Emily X.R. Pan. This story is about a girl who’s mother died but is trying to find what her mom is showing her when she turned into a “red-crowned crane, but with a long, feathery tail … [and] every feather was a different shade of red, sharp and gleaming.”(Pan) The appearance of her mother as a bird could just be random and unimportant, but this story follows the Checkhov’s Gun concept and the scarlet bird is constantly a big part of the book.
With Checkhov’s Gun, everything in a piece of literature is there for a reason, all seemingly important things will be explored further.