Payoff

If you created good Promises and Progress, the Payoff should flow naturally. If you get stuck thinking of a “cool ending” for the story, as if you could just create any ending you want, it reveals you haven’t made clear promises and progress. The payoff for a storyline is merely the satisfying, unavoidable conclusion of everything that you set up earlier.

If you promised a storyline about a character overcoming their fears, then it must be paid off at the end by the hero overcoming their fears. Anything else would feel incoherent, random, and unsatisfying.

If you promised big fantasy battles, then there must be a payoff with a big fantasy battle.

If you introduced a gun in the second chapter, it must go off at some point later in the story. (Also known as Chekhov’s Gun.)

Almost all stories follow the same payoff structure. During the book, the hero successfully makes progress towards their goal. Just before the ending, however, things start to fall apart and the hero doubts themselves. (Which should cause the reader to doubt if the promise would be fulfilled.) Then, in the climax, they find new inspiration and end up winning anyway.

Completely predictable. And still almost all stories use it, because it leads to a big payoff, and that’s satisfying.

Isn’t this too predictable?

Yes, it is predictable. But does that matter? You have the whole story to be surprising or create unexpected plot turns. So make those parts unpredictable, and not the ending. When in doubt, err on the side of predictability over “subverting expectations”.

With stories, as with everything, it’s more about the journey than the destination.

Yes, a bad ending can ruin a story. But the real meat of the story, the actual adventure and the actual entertainment, is the Progress bit. All the ending has to do is “not screw it up”. If your ending delivers on your promises, however predictable, I’d say that’s a good ending.

No new information

A very simple rule for satisfying payoffs is “no new information”.

The payoff itself (or just before it) should NOT tell the audience some new information. All information you need for the payoff should have been presented at an earlier moment

Instead, the payoff merely acts on the information, or connects the different pieces of information for the first time. As always, this is true for the whole story, but also for small setups and payoffs throughout the story.

The Payoff Quote

Below is a saying that helps me remember this.

“Give them what they want, but not how they expect it.”

That being said, there’s a common way to make your ending just a little better.

Plot Expansion

I think Brandon Sanderson coined the term “Plot Expansion”. The idea is simple.

Your promise at the start is intentionally smaller than the one on which you deliver.

In other words, your ending has a predictable payoff … and something more. Could be an event that sets up the next book. Could be a payoff for something the reader wasn’t expecting to be paid off (in such a major way).

The most common approach, though, is to add an extra promise as the story progresses. While delivering on your first promise, you basically dangle a new one in front of the reader. Slowly, they get hooked on this other side of the plot, this other promise.

Then, in the end, you deliver on both.

Hence the title Plot Expansion. By increasing your payoff, creating a larger ending than the initial promise warrants, you can expand your ending and make it more creative.

Climax vs Resolution

These are two different things.

• The climax of your story is the point at which the conflict is at its worst (or the stakes are highest). It’s so bad, that the hero must act, and in a way that ends the conflict definitively.
• The resolution comes after the climax. It winds down the story and shows what happened after the hero solved the conflict.

The climax pays off the biggest promise of the story. If your story was a big adventure to defeat some evil, the climax concerns defeating that evil for good. If your story was about finding true love, the climax concerns finally finding it.

The resolution (afterwards) pays off any minor promises, any remaining setups or plot threads. Maybe a few mysteries were yet unanswered. Maybe some side characters still needed closure.

The period between climax and resolution is often longer than people expected. It “winds down” the story, going from its highest peak, to a new satisfying state.

It’s unusual to resolve minor promises in the moments leading up to the climax. Because that payoff will diminish the rising tension and conflict, making the buildup to the climax less streamlined. What does happen, is that minor promises merge with the big one leading up to the climax. (Different storylines merge leading up to the final climax.)

In most narrative structures (such as the Hero’s Journey), the end of the story should be a “mirror” of the start. At the start, you showed the hero’s current life, their “status quo”. It’s very satisfying if the story then ends by showing how the hero returns home and how their life has changed to a new status quo. It’s the ultimate payoff!

To do that, you need some chapters of “resolution” after the climax.

A real-life example

As I write this, a new Mission Impossible film just landed in theaters. It is a “part one”, with the next part coming in a year.

These films have the very dangerous habit of feeling “unfinished”. It’s a Part One, right? So it’s not the whole story and they usually don’t get satisfying endings.

That’s almost always the biggest critique. The reason why Part One’s get lower ratings: the story feels unfinished and only like a setup for the actual story.

But this new MI film received extremely high ratings and barely anyone who gave that criticism. Why?

Because the creators purposely said to themselves: “The movie should not just end with a cliffhanger. It should have its own satisfying ending. One that merely dares the audience to NOT come back for the second part.” (I read this in a behind-the-scenes piece.)

This is a real-life example that somewhat “proves” that Payoff matters! Even if a story is just the first book in a series. Even if it seems exciting to end with a cliffhanger.

People want Payoff and satisfying conclusions, so prefer giving those over cheap tension or just cutting your story into random parts.

Conclusion

This course started with a very high-level overview of plot. Then I gave you a more narrow view (with the 3 P’s), then went even more narrow by going in-depth on Promise, Progress and Payoff.

Let’s continue this pattern. Now that you have a general idea of how plots work, let’s go in-depth on how you would write such an idea. How do I write the promise? How much time do I spend on it? Which information should get a whole scene, and what should I literally tell the reader?

Yes, we’re diving into the centuries old debate of “show versus tell”. When to write a whole scene, and when to literally tell the reader what you want them to know.