Setup & Payoff

This isn’t necessarily a narrative structure. It’s a very simple idea that you’ll probably use many times in any story you write. Still, I wanted to give it its own chapter, because of how important it is to making other narrative structures work.

When in doubt, I always opt to break my tutorials into smaller parts. It’s better for learning, in my experience. If you practice the idea of setup and payoff a few times, you’ll be much better equipped to handle the coming chapters.

What is it?

Well, the idea is simply that you add elements to a story in two parts.

1. The setup. This introduces the element, the idea, the rules.
2. The payoff. This information is later used to resolve a conflict, win the fight, defeat evil, solve the climax, whatever.

That’s it.

This has two practical consequences.

• Whenever you use information to resolve conflict, it must be setup at some earlier moment.
• Whenever you give the reader specific information, it must serve some purpose. It must be “paid off” later, otherwise the information feels useless.

A common question posed at authors is “I have idea X and Y, do you think that would work?” Or “I know writing advice says you should do X, but I want to do Y, is that okay?”

The only real answer is …

You can do everything in a story, as long as you set it up.

Why does it work?

I find this part of stories infinitely fascinating. Even though stories are being told to us, and they’re not actually interactive, we would sure like them to be.

Humans are problem solvers. So when a story shows a problem or a mystery, we start thinking about it. We want to solve it, preferably before the story literally tells us the answer.

If something happens in the story, and we could not have known, it feels like we’ve been cheated. It feels like the world throws some random good/bad luck our way, instead of a story with meaning and a puzzle.

As such, any big moment in a story will only feel good if, in hindsight, the reader “could have known”. There must be a setup. There must be clues, hints, bits of information along the way, which the reader could’ve used to imagine the event in advance.

Other reasons of lesser importance are …

• We want everything in stories to have meaning. Stories are a “heightened reality”: they only tell the parts that are needed for the story. In other words, if you explain information, readers want that information to have a purpose later on.
• Setup and payoff is a form of tension and release. When something is introduced, but not used or expanded upon yet, we feel tension. What are they going to do with it? When will they use it? Could it be used to do X? Why is the author telling us this? Let’s continue reading/watching and find out! Once the setup has its payoff, this tension is released.

Now write

Write a story with several setups and payoffs. One major setup, and a few minor ones.

Remember the simple rules.

• You sneakily give information at some earlier point. (Maybe you explain something about the character’s past, or an object they’re carrying, or a magic spell they can cast.)
• Then you must use that information at a later moment in the story. Preferably a major plot point where this information is crucial for resolving conflict.

It might sound like this is not worth your time. I recommend still doing the exercise. It’s astonishing how many writers never got into the habit of “setup and payoff”.

It even happens in films costing millions of dollars. They clearly try to set something up, but forget to pay it off. Instead, at the end, they pull some random thing out of the hat that you couldn’t have foreseen. This completely ruins the immersion, and usually doesn’t help the plot either.

Don’t let this happen to you. Write some setups and payoffs!