Setup and payoff are the foundation of any good story… but they’re SUPER hard to pull off.
Let’s go over some examples, both good and bad, then create our own setups/payoffs together!
Category: Setup/Payoff
Foreshadowing can add a lot of depth and fun to your story, but how do you do it?
Let’s take a look at some examples, then write a grimdark/steampunk version of Animorphs to practice!
Game of Thrones’s ending was bad. Lost’s ending was bad. The Soprano’s ending was bad. The list goes on and on.
But why do endings usually end up so unsatisfying? Why are they so hard to pull off?
Let’s find out!
Everyone is always talking about “subverting expectations” when it comes to critiquing media recently.
But what does that exactly mean? And is it a good thing or a bad thing?
Let’s find out!
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!
Just having an idea isn’t enough to write a good story.
For example, you might come up with a cool idea for a story like: an alternate world where dragons are the size of chickens and people farm them.
And then your brain might fire off a bunch of other details like: there are lots of different dragon species that lay different-flavored eggs, farmers have to wear protective gear when taking the eggs, and Kentucky Fried Dragon would probably be a chain restaurant too.
Those are all fun details, but they’re not a story. To get a story, you need to have a setup and a payoff that uses your idea.
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: