The Gun on the Wall and the Footprint under the Window: Setups and Payoffs in Fiction

A concept that seems not always well understood by fiction writers, though it is regularly discussed in screenwriting, is that of setups and payoffs. A novel can be seen as one big exercise in setting up and paying off: you set up a conflict, and its resolution is the payoff. But it’s also a tapestry of smaller setups and payoffs: some elements of your narrative create expectations in the reader which are satisfied later in the story.

At a smaller scale, a joke is a setup—a straight line or a situation—followed by a payoff—the punchline. So a comedy is a sequence of humorous setups and payoffs. A mystery, of course, is a setup: its solution is the payoff. It too is composed of smaller setups/payoffs. If our sleuth finds a footprint under the window, the reader expects to find out whom it belongs to. If the footprint has no role in solving the mystery, we feel cheated at some level—or at a minimum, the author has wasted our attention, creating a subliminal question in our mind that takes our focus away from things that the writer does want us to be aware of.

In a classic mystery, that footprint might be a red herring, a false clue that points suspicion away from the real murderer. A mystery reader even expects some of those. But what you can’t do is mention the footprint and not tell us, at some point, whose it is: that subverts expectation the wrong way. The most famous maxim about setups is Chekhov’s remark that if there’s a rifle hanging on the wall in Act I, it must be fired by Act III. The rifle sets up the idea of a gunshot in the audience’s mind, even if subliminally.

Some of the greatest openings in literature are setups: It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife. Immediately we expect to meet this single man and understand that there will be a competition among young ladies for a husband.

It’s worth noting that this setup leads not to the central plot of Pride and Prejudice, but to another setup. The “single man” of the first line is Mr. Bingley, and its payoff is Elizabeth Bennet meeting not him but his friend Mr. Darcy. That event launches the driving action of the novel—which is interwoven with other setups and payoffs, such as Elizabeth’s attraction to Mr. Wickham, later revealed to be a bounder; the pompous Mr. Collins’ pursuit of Elizabeth and her rejection of him—and so on.

Just as readers count on narrative setups being paid off and feel conscious or unconscious dissatisfaction when that doesn’t happen, readers expect key plot points to connect to facts or character elements that have been established earlier. Taking the mystery example again: if the detective wraps up the case by saying, “and we know it was you, Throckmorton, because you left your footprint beneath the window!” and there has been no mention of a footprint, that’s pretty unsatisfying.

Some setups are what might be called latent or silent ones: the author includes information or an image that will come into play later without calling attention to it, just so the reader isn’t left wondering, “now where did that come from?” This is also called planting or establishing a fact (or character trait, or clue, etc.). In Hollywood they call it “laying pipe.” If a vital scene of your novel involves a husband striking his wife in a jealous rage, you need to establish early on that he’s prone to jealousy, or the moment feels unearned.

To take a Hollywood example, in the climactic battle of Game of Thrones, Arya Stark, a teenager, kills a seemingly invincible villain with an exceptional bit of knifeplay—so exceptional, for a young woman especially, that it might feel implausible. Except that the writers have carefully set it up by showing her practicing this very skill at two earlier points in the series where it was merely incidental to the business of the scene.

I recently edited a richly textured, deftly written novel about a young woman who takes a job assisting a famously difficult and uncompromising older painter. She is intimidated, yet inspired, by the older woman’s example, and privately begins working on drawings of her own. The book ended with these two characters, after some challenging episodes, acknowledging that they have gained from each other. It was a good resolution, but something was missing. I realized the moment where young, self-doubting Alex showed flinty Paula her artworks had not been narrated: we learned about it afterward. I pointed this out to the author, who said, “of course!” And promptly wrote a handful of pages that paid off this crucial setup beautifully. She delivered what writing manuals call “the necessary scene.”

So if you’re feeling that your novel or story is lacking some oomph, look at it again and ask: Are all my setups paid off? And look at it the other way too: could my payoffs be set up better? When your setups and payoffs are in balance, your manuscript will deliver both the right amount of anticipation, and a satisfying sense of resolution. And no one will close the book saying, “Wait, why was that gun hanging there?”

Note: This essay originally appeared at the website of the Independent Editors Group, an association of experienced freelance editors I have recently joined. The IEG has recently started an "Advice" page where my colleagues and I will post about writing, editing, and the publishing business. Anything I post there will also appear here, but the reverse is not necessarily true. 

Whose Business Model Is Broken Anyway?

It's been some time since your friend the Doctor has posted here--preoccupied as he has been with sorting out the syntax of authors far and wide--but a publishing story in, of all places, the New York Post, has prompted him to pick up his quill and stab it into the inkwell, with a snort of irritation. 

Once again poor old book publishing, the Post's Keith Kelly tells us, is to be "disrupted," this time by the online platform Substack, which has already taken a whack at disrupting magazine and newspaper publishing by peeling writers away from their media-company employers and offering their content directly to readers via subscription. Now, apparently, it's coming for the book industry. 

Media journalist Zack Greenburg, who has written four books for houses like Penguin Portfolio and Simon & Schuster, will release his new book, We Are All Musicians Now, in weekly installments on Substack. A paid subscription will cost $5 a month or $50 a year (typical of Substack); he will also post other content weekly that readers can get free. In the Post, Greenburg sounds pretty jazzed: "All in all, with the advance money being in the same ballpark, I’d rather go to a place where I can be my own boss with a higher upside than try to force it through an old business model that I think is broken." 

I'm all for exploring new business models, but when I hear someone bashing publishing as "broken," I cock a skeptical eyebrow. As I've said in my own book, What Editors Do, publishing has been declared broken repeatedly since Gutenberg. The industry has plenty of problems, but in fact it has weathered the digital era--and even a worldwide pandemic-- far more successfully than many other media businesses.  To compare Substack's "disruptive" model with conventional books,  let's look at the "value propositions" side by side by doing a little arithmentic. 

A typical book might run 75-100,000 words. Let's say Greenburg's is 80,000, just to make this math simple. And let's say Greenburg posts a 2000-word excerpt each week--that's long for a Substack but we'll assume he's a real fast typist....It'll take 40 weeks, roughly 8 months, to get his whole book posted, by which point a subscriber has paid $40 (or $50 if they went with the annual rate). 

In other words, the subscriber is paying $40-50 for content they could buy for roughly $25-30 in the form of a hardcover book, or $10-15 as an ebook. In either of those formats, they could read the whole thing at once (no waiting a week between chapters); bookmark or search passages--even give it to another person in the case of the print book. 

So Greenburg and Substack propose to charge their consumer a price four or five times what tired old conventional publishing would ask for a more convenient, more enduring version of the same product. But they will dribble it out over several months. Well, that's a new business model all right!  But it's not clear to me that it's any kind of improvement on what "broken" old book publishing has to offer, from a reader's perspective. 

Maybe what Greenburg believes is that it's a better deal for him, and given the markup just described, you'd think it would be. But that's not clear either, given the chunk of subscription revenues that Substack takes in return for what it advances an author. Other authors who got Substack advances have not necessarily found the economics favorable. One, Matthew Yglesias, concluded accepting an advance had cost him nearly $400,000 in subscription revenue.  

I'm no knee-jerk defender of traditional publishing, as readers of earlier posts here are aware. And writers are entitled to make a living however they want--there is no easy way, goodness knows. But bashing the industry as "broken" is a cheap shot, especially if your whizbang new model is a worse deal for readers.

[photograph via libertypressia.com] 

"The imagination has a conscience all its own": Philip Roth on Fact and Fiction

The Center for Fiction, which in my un-objective opinion is becoming one of the most happening literary hangouts in New York, had one of its best events yet last week--an evening with and about Philip Roth.  The National Book Critics circle put it together, and their printed program for the event included some wonderful excerpts from reviews of Roth's work over the years (Saul Bellow thought the "fault" of Goodbye, Columbus was its sophistication). But the best excerpt was from Roth himself, accepting the NBCC fiction award for The Counterlife in 1988. I have never read a better statement of how novelists treat life experience, or history:

You begin with the raw material, the facts, what appear in the morning light to be potentially exploitable facts. One by one you turn them over in your mind. This can take days, it can take years. The mind conducts the examination at its own pace--are these facts really any good?--and one day turns the facts over to the imagination. The imagination goes to work. It is not a pleasant sight. The imagination is pitiless, brutal, and cruel. It lacks common decency, discretion, manners, loyalty--yes, it lacks even compassion. The imagination has a conscience all its own; you wouldn't want it as a friend. 

The butcher, imagination, wastes no time with niceties: it clubs the fact over the head, quickly it slits the throat, and then with its bare hands, it pulls forth the guts. Soon the guts of facts are everywhere, the imagination is simply wading through them. By the time the imagination is finished with a fact, believe me, it bears no resemblance to a fact. The imagination then turns a dripping mass of eviscerated factuality back to the mind. The mind (if it is a mind) is no less brutal than the imagination and it is not impressed. It finds that that the fact has been badly butchered. It sends down for fresh raw material, new facts. And all this goes on day in and day out, though there are days of course, when the savagery gets to be too much even for them and, overcome with self-loathing, even mind and imagination haven't the heart to continue.

By the way, if you are a fiction lover, the Center for Fiction's website should be a regular stop for you. Recently revamped, it posts fantastic new content all the time, including original stories from leading authors, interviews and videos, book recommendations, and lots more. And if you are a fiction lover in the New York City area, the Center itself, on 47th Street right near Grand Central, should be a regular stop too. It has an unmatched circulating library of 85,000 books, including novels you'll find nowhere else, and literary programming second to nobody in the city. Can you think of anywhere else in town where you might hear Philip Roth read--or see him chatting with Zadie Smith and Nathan Englander?

(photo of Philip Roth © Nancy Crampton)

Looking into the Future: Partially Obstructed View

I have already referred on this page to a classic children's book, Hugh Lofting's The Story of Doctor Dolittle. I thought of it again this past weekend, when I attended the Writing the Future conference at the Writers' Center of Bethesda, organized by Creative Nonfiction magazine.* I joined a  group of panelists discussing various topics around the central theme: that question we have all been asking ourselves for some time now, What's going to happen to writing and publishing in the digital age? 

There were several sharp and articulate presenters:  Creative Nonfiction will be posting information and videos from the conference on Facebook, and many of the key points can be plucked from the Twitter stream of attendees here. 

Nonetheless, this gathering brought home to me once again: nobody knows what the future of publishing is. In some sense, editors are always hoping to guess the future, to anticipate what people are going to want to read about a year or two down the road. But it's a chancy business, because as I said at the conference, to make such guesses based on the present or recent past is a great way to be disastrously off base. A mistake our industry repeats over and over is rushing to sign up books on a topic that's all over the news today. Alas, when that book comes out a year or two from now, the hot subject du jour is yesterday's news. And I mentioned in my last post, publishers who decided at one point that science was a hot category quickly glutted the market and made it ice cold. 

Predicting the future of reading or writing--what kind of devices will be used, what kind of writing will sell (long or short, fiction or memoir, etc., etc.), what can be "monetized" and how--is even more challenging than predicting the sales of a book on Bernard Madoff or the Tea Party, because there are so many more variables.  I came away from the conference reinforced in my enduring belief that fresh ideas and good stories, well told, will always have an audience, and a market. As my fellow panelist (and, full disclosure, Bloomsbury author) Pagan Kennedy pointed out, Thoreau's Walden would have made a terrific blog.

So what does this have to do with Doctor Dolittle? More on that tomorrow. 

*Creative Nonfiction has just revamped its format and its first new-look issue is out, featuring Dave Eggers, Richard Rodriguez, Bill McKibben, Carolyn Forche, and others.  Take a look here.

Keys to Good Writing--48 of Them

So Cormac McCarthy is selling his typewriter. Traditionalists need not fear: he's replacing it with another one. The retired machine, bought circa 1963, has just got a bit worn down after almost half a century of clacking away, churning out a dozen novels and a sheaf of other works.

Today the Guardian's Books Blog lists a few other old-school authors who still love their old-fashioned typewriters. Don DeLillo says "I need the sound of the keys...The hammers striking the page. I like to see the words, the sentences, as they take shape." Will Self says that with a typewriter, "You don't revise as much, you just think more, because you know you're going to have to retype the entire fucking thing." (I, and several of my fellow editors, believe that since the word processor came into widespread use, the tendency of manuscripts to balloon to excessive lengths has become more pronounced.)

I know exactly what DeLillo means about the sound of the keys. The photo of McCarthy's trusty Olivetti reminded me of my mother's Hermes Rocket, another slim but sturdy portable whose keyboard I gleefully bashed away at long before I knew how to actually read or write. I remember exactly how satisfying it felt to hear the clickety-clack and see the letters marching across the page. Who cared if they made words?

But when I learned how to make words of my own, using the typewriter got to be even more fun.  I even, at age 5 or so, wrote a very, very short novel titled "Sandy the Sandpail." I honestly don't remember the plot of S. the S., but I do remember chapter 6, because other members of my family have enjoyed, for decades, quoting it at me in its entirety:
"Sandy the Sandpail had a friend called Goldie. Nothing happened to Goldie."

Obviously, the use of the typewriter has influenced the elliptical style that Cormac McCarthy and I share.

The Kindest Word in the English Language

I've often heard my father say, "sometimes the kindest word in the English language is No." He has been both an editor and a writer, and I think his views on this point come from the latter perspective. When you have sent a manuscript or a pitch to a publisher, what you want to hear, of course, is Yes. But failing that, a quick No is a lot more helpful, and merciful, than a long, agonizing silence.

When I was a junior editor, I wanted to impress agents with my keen editorial brain, so I would sometimes take an hour or more to craft a rejection letter that showed my incisive understanding of the flaws of the manuscript I was sending back. It wasn't that easy to find an hour or two with everything else I had to do, so sometimes it would take me a few weeks actually to compose my brilliant decline. Now that I have been at the game longer, I've realized that a brief, even brusque "no thanks" sent in a day or two is generally more welcome to an agent or author than an extended critique that arrives weeks later. I still sometimes hold onto submissions longer than I should, either because I'm genuinely on the fence or because I've got the bad old feeling that I need to explain why I'm saying no. But I try to err on the side of promptness rather than well-meaning delay.

If editors need to say no more promptly, writers need to learn to say no, period. Nothing is worse for a writer's productivity than, well, all the things he or she does beside writing. Going to conferences, reading other people's galleys to blurb them, doing a book review--these are all worthwhile activities, and if you do enough of them, your own book will never get written.  Another memory of my days as a junior editor: I was publishing a novel I was crazy about and I knew a famous literary novelist would be a perfect reader for it. I composed a fervent, personal blurb request and sent it to her with a bound proof. I soon received a letter back from her that read something like this (I'm quoting from memory):

Dear Mr. Ginna,

Here is a partial list of things I am responsible for at this moment: one dog, three cats, a parakeet, two book reviews, three magazine articles, and one novel. Much as I would like to read what you have sent me I cannot possibly take it on at this time.

Yours very truly,

(the famous novelist)

Needless to say I was disappointed and a little miffed; I was even more miffed a couple of months later when I found a colleague of mine had received the same letter, with her name typed in where mine had been. The famous novelist was cranking out form letters in reply to our heartfelt entreaties!

By the time I got to be a grizzled senior editor, I felt differently about these form letters. I had realized that most people who got my begging letters didn't bother to write back at all, so the prompt form letter was comparatively courteous. And having worked with many more authors, I had seen how many of them got nibbled to death by well-intentioned requests and projects, and were months or years late on their commitments, because they were too nice to say No. It is not a coincidence that the famous novelist has written more than two dozen books in the two decades since our exchange.

The problem is not confined to the literary world. I recently came across the printed postcard that Francis Crick, who became a world celebrity for his role in deciphering the structure of DNA, used to fend off the stream of requests that came his way.

Sometimes saying No is a kindness to yourself, too.

The Program No Professor Should Be Without

Everybody complains about academic writing, but nobody does anything about it. Now, some brainiacs at the University of Chicago Writing Program have at last brought technology to bear on the crisis. Tired of reading turgid, jargon-laden, politically correct prose? Sorry, can't help you there. But if you're tired of writing it, the U of C has just the tool for you: the Automatic Academic Sentence Generator. Just pick a few terms from the drop-down menus--like "the gendered body", "the nation-state," or "epistemology"--click, and you can get something like this:

The politics of normative value(s) may be parsed as the (re)formation of the nation-state:

Is that not quite what you meant? No problem! Click again for an instant edit, and you get this:

The (re)formation of the nation-state may be parsed as the politics of normative value(s).

This little device is good for a department meeting's worth of amusement at least. Try it for yourself, and don't miss the avatars Pootwattle, the virtual academic, and Smedley, the virtual critic.