I recently watched Netflix’s “Bird Box” and I felt disappointed because there was a lot of setup, but little payoff.
What better way to vent my frustration than to come up with some new payoffs together with chat!
During the last stream, we did the setup/payoff exercise that we’ve done before, but with a twist: our goal was to give the Netflix movie “Bird Box” a better payoff.
For those who don’t know, “Bird Box” is about a supernatural presence that engulfs the world, and anyone who looks at it kills themself. To escape it, a mother and her two children have to navigate down a river blindfolded.
An interesting premise/setup for sure! But without getting into spoiler territory, let’s just say the ending doesn’t live it up its promise. Time to fix it with the power of the Internet!
You can see what we did here,
or scroll down for the quick outline.
Chat voted for some story ideas that we started with to get some practice coming up with setups/payoffs. Here’s what we came up with for the three of them:
|
The Idea |
The Setup |
The Payoff |
| If you eat a certain addictive substance, you go insane and want more, even if it means killing others. | (1) Someone figures out that they have an immunity to the drug after being forced to take it by a dealer.
(2) The inventor of the drug used to be a gov employee, but the gov was shut down for too long and he stole the drugs and became a dealer to make money. (3) The drug is of extraterrestrial origin. |
(1) The drug dealers want to kill the person with immunity because they don’t want an antidote made using their blood/genes. It’s a race of survival, and in the end the person with immunity wins and offers a cure.
(2) After the government shutdown, the FBI investigates and finds out the drug was invented by the CIA to let loose on a foreign adversary. It ends up ruining the U.S., and the cure comes from the country it was supposed to be unleashed upon. (3) Humans and aliens discover they have a common ancestor. |
| There is a water bottle that can’t hold water. It feels useless and struggles with finding its purpose in life | (1) An NFL player’s “lucky” water bottle gets a hole in it after years of use and is discarded into recycling. The water bottle travels by rolling and discovers a hidden underground community of other non-functional products, and manufacturing errors.
(2) The water bottle was brought home with its 23 siblings in a big 24-pack of bottled water. When it arrives at the house and the pack is opened though, it is empty because it has a hole in it. |
(1) The water bottle lives with the other products, but it feels like it’s missing something. Eventually it leaves and is “kidnapped” by recyclers. But then the water bottle is turned into a new bottle for new people, and it feels happy again.
(2) Instead of being recycled, the one with a hole ends up being used upside down in a potted plant, and the bottle learns something good can come through a disability. |
| Dessert is outlawed. You’re an ice cream seller with no cash and a sick kid. | (1) Sugar has been outlawed as the cause of the obesity/diabetes epidemic. The seller sells sugar-less ice cream instead, but it’s actually worse for you than real sugar. | (1) Eventually he finds out how bad this new stuff is for people, and also learns that the population is suffering from low blood sugar and medical complications due to the sugar ban. He petitions his government and/or runs for office, on the platform of un-banning sugar and advocating proper nutritional education instead. It turns out his sick child was suffering from low blood sugar all along, so by feeding ice cream to his kid he saves their life. |
Not a bad start! Now here’s what we came up with for “Bird Box” and its many different setups:
|
The Idea |
The Setup |
The Payoff |
| A supernatural presence arrives on the world, and looking at it makes people kill themselves. | (1) A woman sets out with her two kids in search of a rumored safe commune, but they all have to stay blindfolded.
(2) Also “crazy” people are not affected by it and try to lure people into looking at it. (3) Also the children have grown up in this world, have never seen outdoors, and have learned to move by sound. (4) Also birds can sense when the “presence” is nearby… sometimes? (5) Also the woman has anxiety and never left her house at the beginning of the film. |
(1, 3) Along the way, something happens and the woman has to take off her blindfold to help the children survive to the commune. But when she does, she sees that the kids are not wearing their blindfolds and they’re fine. As it turns out, the “presence” only affects people who were born BEFORE it arrived. Since they grew up with it around, they’re immune to it, and they love it as much as we love our blue sky/sun. That’s the last thing the woman sees/hears before she kills herself.
(1) The longer you’ve survived, the stronger you are against the “presence’s” influence, and since they’ve survived for 5 years, they can take off their blindfolds and see it without going insane. (1, 5) They get to the commune, but the people there worships the “presence” as a god, and it is surrounded by dead birds. The commune cultists have their eyes seared out. (1, 2, 5) At the end, the woman is forced to look at the “presence,” but she is okay, because she has mental illness as well: anxiety. Perhaps the presence causes PTSD/anxiety/depression in all of remaining humanity, making them all immune to it. “Mentally ill” people become the new majority, and old “sane” people are now considered mentally ill. (4) Maybe the “presence” is demonic, and it forces people to commit suicide because suicide is a Christian sin and denies them access to Heaven. So those who die that way are reborn as birds, hence why they freak out when the “presence” is near, trying to warn people. |
Not bad! I don’t think that the payoffs we came up with are mind-blowing or anything, but they’re on the right track to at least give us some payoffs to the many setups.
You need both a setup AND a payoff to tell a good story. Without both, it’s like trying to hit a home run without both a pitch AND a hit. Either you’re just going to be throwing baseballs at no one, or you’re just going to swing around at the air.
Unfortunately that’s what happened with “Bird Box” but it doesn’t have to happen to your story if you plan a bit before you start writing it!
If you want to join us and help write a story by trolling in chat, or share your own writing for feedback, then we’d love to have you. We stream on Twitch every Sunday, Tuesday, and Thursday at 6:30pm-10:30pm (U.S. Eastern Standard Time).
And you missed the stream, you can still watch them on the YouTube channel or watch the full stream reruns.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Scott Wilson is the author of the novel Metl: The ANGEL Weapon,
forthcoming March 2019.