What Is a MacGuffin?
Quick answer: What is a MacGuffin? The object everyone in the story wants, whose exact nature barely matters: the falcon, the briefcase, the plans. Definition and examples.
A MacGuffin is the object, document or goal that everyone in a story is chasing, whose precise nature matters far less than the chase it powers. The stolen plans, the black falcon statuette, the glowing briefcase: the characters care intensely what it is, and the audience mostly does not need to, because the MacGuffin's real job is to set people in motion and reveal who they are while moving. Alfred Hitchcock popularised the term and cheerfully insisted the thing itself could be almost nothing.
The concept matters to working writers because it clarifies a division of labour: desire drives plot, but the target of desire can be nearly arbitrary. Once you see that the falcon is interchangeable and the greed around it is not, you know where to spend your effort.
The longer answer: Hitchcock's joke and its serious point
Hitchcock explained the term with a shaggy anecdote about two men on a Scottish train, one carrying a device 'for trapping lions in the Highlands'; told there are no lions in the Highlands, he replies that in that case it is no MacGuffin at all. The joke encodes the definition: the MacGuffin is whatever the plot pretends to be about, and its emptiness is a feature. In his spy films the secret plans or the uranium in the wine bottles exist to justify pursuit, suspicion and betrayal, the things the films are actually about.
There is a spectrum, though, and it is worth mapping. At the pure end sits the briefcase in Pulp Fiction, never opened for the audience, its glow doing all the work. Mid-spectrum, the Maltese falcon has a history and a value, but any priceless object would serve. At the far end, objects like Tolkien's Ring stop being MacGuffins altogether: the Ring's specific nature, its corruption of every carrier, generates the plot rather than merely occasioning it. The test is substitution. If you can swap the object without rewriting the story, it is a MacGuffin.
Famous MacGuffins and what they teach
Dashiell Hammett's The Maltese Falcon (1930) remains the model: a jewelled bird whose eventual worthlessness is the point, since the novel's true subject is what greed does to everyone circling it. Hitchcock's North by Northwest chases microfilmed government secrets so vague they are barely named. Raiders of the Lost Ark runs on a genuinely powerful object, yet notice that its power matters only in the final minutes; for two hours the Ark is a gold box everybody wants.
The lesson across the examples is consistent: strong MacGuffin stories spend their words on the wanting, not the wanted. Hammett gives the falcon a paragraph of history and gives Gutman, Cairo and Brigid chapters of manoeuvring. When newer writers reverse the ratio, pages of lore about the artefact, thin sketches of the people chasing it, the story becomes a catalogue entry with a chase attached.
How to deploy a MacGuffin in your own fiction
Choose the object for its social properties, not its technical ones: it should be portable, contestable, and valuable to several parties for different reasons. Different reasons is the engine; a MacGuffin wanted by three people for one motive produces a race, while one wanted for three motives produces a plot. Then keep its description scarce. Scarcity is what lets readers project importance onto it, the way the unopened briefcase glows brighter than any listed contents could.
Guard the emotional accounts separately. Readers will accept that the microfilm is a pretext, but they will not accept that the relationships are. Whatever your characters sacrifice for the MacGuffin must be real: trust, safety, a sister's regard. In a short story, where a 2,000-word cap gives you no room for lore, the pretext object is a gift; Writory's contest archives fill each month with chase stories, and the ones that place are about the chasers.
Misconceptions and edge cases
Because the word has become film-critic shorthand, it gets applied to everything portable in a plot. Some boundaries help.
What poets can take from this
- Pick a MacGuffin several characters want for different reasons; motive variety is the engine.
- Describe the object scarcely and the desire lavishly.
- Run the substitution test: if swapping the object rewrites your story, you have outgrown the MacGuffin.
- Keep sacrifices real even when the prize is hollow; readers forgive empty briefcases, not empty relationships.
- Consider ending on the object's worthlessness only if greed or faith was your true subject.
Try it yourself
Write a 1,200-word story in which four people at a house clearance all want the same locked tin box, each for a different reason, and the box is never opened on the page. Let what they offer, threaten and surrender for it reveal all four lives.
Questions
Did Hitchcock invent the term MacGuffin?
He popularised it; the coinage is usually credited to his screenwriter colleague Angus MacPhail. Hitchcock's lectures and interviews from the 1930s onward fixed the concept in film culture, along with the lion-trapping anecdote he loved retelling.
Is the One Ring a MacGuffin?
By the strict definition, no. The Ring's specific nature, corrupting its bearers and binding them to its maker, generates the plot's central conflicts. Swap it for a generic treasure and the entire story changes, which fails the substitution test that defines a true MacGuffin.
Does a MacGuffin need to be revealed by the end?
No, and some of the most effective ones never are; the unopened briefcase is the famous case. Reveal it only if the revelation pays off your theme. If the story is about the wanting, the contents can stay a rumour forever.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated July 2026.
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