What a MacGuffin is

A term you'll meet in narrative device (Hitchcock).

A MacGuffin is an object, goal, or device that drives a story's plot — everyone wants it, chases it, or fights over it — yet whose actual nature barely matters. Its only real job is to set the characters in motion.

The point is that it has no point

What makes a MacGuffin a MacGuffin is its emptiness. The plot needs the characters to pursue something; what that something specifically is can be almost arbitrary. The stolen plans, the secret formula, the briefcase whose glowing contents we never see — the audience's attention is meant to be on the chase and the characters, not the prize.

Hitchcock's term

The director Alfred Hitchcock popularised the word and loved the device. He told a little parable: two men on a train, one asks about a package in the luggage rack, the other says it's a "MacGuffin" — "an apparatus for trapping lions in the Scottish Highlands." But there are no lions in the Highlands. "Then that's no MacGuffin!" The joke is that the MacGuffin is, in the end, nothing.

MacGuffin vs. Chekhov's gun

They're different tools. A MacGuffin motivates the plot but is significant only as a goal — its details don't pay off. Chekhov's gun is a planted detail that must pay off later. One is a pretext for motion; the other is a promise the story has to keep.

How to spot one

Ask whether the thing everyone's chasing could be swapped for almost anything else without changing the story's real concerns. If the answer is yes — if the prize is just an engine for pursuit — you've found a MacGuffin.

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