I've been blogging about ways to write in a more meaningful or literary fashion. This post is more about driving any kind of story, but with a particular emphasis on how this method can be made more meaningful. One of the most popular ways two drive a story is through a race to acquire that one mighty thing that may save or destroy the world, the awe-inspiring MacGuffin. MacGuffins can have greater merit than just as a plot device.
According to TVTropes.com, MacGuffins are "a mysterious package/artifact/superweapon that everyone in the story is chasing." Even if you've never heard of MacGuffins, you've seen them. They're a staple of Hollywood. Indiana Jones is always racing Nazis/Indigenous peoples/nameless cronies for some kind of archeological MacGuffin. It's the briefcase full of money the crazy cast of "Rat Race" or the Rat Pack (in the older "Ocean's 11") won't be spending. Whatever it is doesn't have to be special to the reader/watcher as long as it matters to the characters. It's the Thing, that all-mighty Thing you can use as the carrot on the string to drive the story (and characters) forward.
Sometimes, the definition is a little more questionable. The Avengers race Thanos for the Infinity Stones in the "Cherry Orchard"/Cassandra plotline of "Infinity War," wherein they see bad things coming but can't prevent them. There are moments when the stones exceed the interchangeable, faceless role of the MacGuffin, but much of the time, they play that role. When Dr. Strange or Loki or Thanos calls on the specific powers of one of the stones, they become more than a MacGuffin. When the characters are just chasing them around, only to lose them anyway, they become MacGuffins. In the recent series Loki, their MacGuffin-ness becomes more clear (no spoilers).
You can look at TVTropes and other sources for countless variants and examples in books, games, and literature of things that everyone seeks, but which turn out to be mostly useless except in its role to drive the story. They appear throughout literature in books like the Percy Jackson series (Zeus's lightning bolt), Series of Unfortunate Events (the Baudelaire fortune), Harry Potter (many of the Horcruxes and Deathly Hallows), the ring, itself, in Lord of the Rings, and so many more. Their appearances are often central to these stories.
People trivialize MacGuffins, but many books with deeper literary merit also center on MacGuffins. A MacGuffin is something about which the characters care about, which keeps the reader/audience invested in the character and plot, whether the item, itself, means anything in the grand scheme of things. It can still be a symbol, something that means something beyond money or a ring or a gem. It keeps the reader interested and entertained, but if you want your piece to have greater meaning than face value, greater than a run-of-the-mill genre piece, it's up to you as the writer to instill that meaning. They can be made to be symbols of darkness, light, love, or anything else. The ring represents addiction, for instance, which becomes clear as the reader watches the characters' obsession with it. The Baudelaire fortune could represent the family they've lost. The Horcruxes represent the darkness and division in the soul that occurs when one pursues actions that harm others.
It's up to you as a writer if you decide to use a MacGuffin to drive your story to figure out how to make it more than an empty thing. How can you do it?
