For the last stream’s exercise, we did something new: talking about how to write a good setup and payoff.
This is something I’ve brought up a lot when chat has suggested ideas for a prompt. Quite often, chat will suggest a cool idea, and I’ll say, “Okay, but what’s the payoff?”
Here’s an example from a few streams back. The idea of being annoyed by an old woman writing a check to pay for her groceries is fine, but what’s the payoff? Our payoff was that the protagonist ended up paying with a traveler’s check, bringing it all full circle.
So we went over what makes a good setup/payoff, came up with some examples, and then wrote a story with a good setup/payoff.
Here’s what we came up with:
You can see a quick recap of what we did here.
As a bit of an experiment, instead of writing a story just for the exercise section, we combined it with the prompt section. We picked a prompt and then applied what we went over during the exercise portion to make it is good as possible.
As usual, chat voted for a prompt and this is the one they picked, submitted by 20312: Nobody dared go near the tower, as a fearsome dragon was at the top. Until one day a knight rode up, “Do you need help to get down?” “Please.”
Instead of just doing normal brainstorming, for this one we brainstormed a bunch of possible setups/payoffs. Chat came up with a bunch of great ideas, but in the end one of them emerged the victor.
I really like our final story. It has a bunch of good setup, a good payoff, and then another twist payoff after that too. It certainly doesn’t drag on any more than it needs to either!
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 7:30pm-10:30pm (U.S. Eastern Standard Time).
And you missed the stream, you can still watch Rubbish to Published, the writing exercises, or the writing prompts on YouTube, or watch the full stream reruns until Twitch deletes them.
Hope to see you next time, friend!
Scott Wilson is the author of the novel Metl: The ANGEL Weapon,
forthcoming November 2018.
Featured image: DeviantArt/Joltink