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] 

What Editors Do Goes on the Road--and on the Air! A Conversation on BookTV, or Maybe in Your Neighborhood

With my book What Editors Do now actually available to buy, I've had the pleasure of appearing in bookstores to talk about it, so far in the company of very articulate contributors and other colleagues. Our first outing, on January 9 was at Politics and Prose in Washington, D.C., one of the truly great independent stores in America. Naturally, given their location, P&P is especially strong in politics, history, and current events, and they have  showcased many books that I've published and hosted many of my authors over the years. So it was a particular thrill for me to headline a book event in my own right.

One of the things that makes indie booksellers great is they really know their community and their customers, and they did, as usual, a wonderful job of attracting an audience to our event. We had a standing-room crowd who helped make a very lively discussion by asking lots of good questions.  I was joined for this event by two contributors to What Editors Do, Cal Morgan of Riverhead Books and Susan Ferber of Oxford University Press, and by Gail Ross, a veteran Washington agent who has represented many terrific nonfiction books, often by the capital's heavy hitters and top journalists.

I began by talking about the three phases of editing that I identify in the book, which provide the organizing principle for it. Cal talked about the "editor as evangelist," from his chapter "Start Spreading the News." Susan discussed working with scholarly authors writing for general readers, based on her chapter, "Of Monographs and Magnum Opuses." And Gail offered the agent's perspective on the role editors play in getting a book from the author's keyboard into the reader's hands. We had a great conversation, and happily, it was all recorded on video by C-Span's BookTV, which has already broadcast it a few times. You can watch the whole thing on the BookTV website--click on this link.

If you're in the New York City area, heads up: I'll speaking again about editing and publishing on Thursday, February 22 at another superb indie bookstore, Book Culture on 112th Street near Columbia University, with another great panel of contributors plus a guest star, Shaye Areheart, director of the Columbia Publishing Course, which has trained people for careers in publishing for three-quarters of a century. Come and bring your questions! Info on the event here.

BookExpo Snapshots: Editors’-Eye-Views of the Publishing Industry, mid-2017

BookExpo, the annual booksellers and publishers convention, has traditionally been the moment for media and book-business observers to take stock of the industry. Like many things about traditional publishing, BookExpo has shrunk in size and schedule in recent years, though it now includes a consumer-oriented portion called BookCon. But editors, sales reps, and booksellers still walk the floor and ask each other “how’s business?”

So I thought I’d honor the tradition and gather some impressions from colleagues. The natural place to start was a ready-made panel of experts—the contributors to the forthcoming essay collection WHAT EDITORS DO, edited by yours truly. (For more on the book, see yesterday’s post.)  I circulated a few questions to my 26 co-authors. Interestingly, many of those who answered were not attending BookExpo, probably because for those who are, this is a crazy-busy week. But I got some thoughtful responses from editors representing Big 5 trade houses, university, and literary indie publishing.

Herewith some brief selections from their answer, with a few of my own comments thrown in. As usual, different perspectives give us a variegated picture of the industry, where cautious optimism is streaked with the awareness of challenges.

What was the first BEA you attended? What do you remember of BookExpos past or present, or what are you looking forward to?

Jane Friedman

Jane Friedman (Blogger, consultant and industry observer at janefriedman.com):  My first BEA was 2004 in Chicago. I don't remember much from that first year, but I attended every year after that for about 10 years. The best part was always meeting and spending time with authors. The worst part was always the lines, lines, lines, and crowding—and feeling done with humanity by the end. I'm not attending this year, but I know it's partly a mistake. Some serendipitous encounter always happens that makes the discomfort and exhaustion worthwhile.

Susan Ferber  (Executive Editor, Oxford University Press):  I have actually never attended the BEA! Since I work for a university press, my highest priority is the conferences in my academic discipline. 

Diana Gill  (Executive Editor, Tor/Macmillan): My first ABA was while I was still in college, courtesy of one of my very first publishing mentors. I remember being so very excited to see the booths and to get ALL THE GALLEYS.  I couldn't believe how cool it was. Your first BEA is a rush, whether it was many years ago or for the new assistants just starting out.

Peter Ginna: I have written elsewhere of memorable BEA experiences and characters. One that was happily not my own was a peer of mine who toiled in an imprint of Random House, back in the days when Random caused a stir by spending a million dollars on a vast, elaborate BookExpo booth featuring an actual “House” in the middle of it. Along with other low-riders on the corporate totem pole, he was stocking the shelves in the booth when an unfamiliar-looking “suit,” cocking his head to examine the custom-made fixtures, said, “how does it look?” The new recruit said, candidly, “I think it looks like a French pissoir.” It was then that he found he was speaking to Alberto Vitale, Random’s CEO.

Carol Fisher Saller

What is the most underappreciated positive development in publishing recently, or the most overhyped negative one? What about the flip side—what is the most underappreciated threat or challenge to book publishers? 

Carol Fisher Saller (University of Chicago Press, author of The Subversive Copy Editor): From the get-go, I was amazed at the hysteria over e-books and how they were going to destroy publishing. Instead, we've seen publishing explode in many new directions, with more kinds of things to read in more kinds of formats than ever before.

PG: One of the most underappreciated challenges to publishing is the dwindling of mass consumer media—newspapers, magazines, and radio especially—that have long been a crucial way for publishers to make readers aware of new books. Online marketing and social media have not yet replaced the reach of, for example, the vanished book-review sections of major newspapers. Another real problem for book publishing is its lack of diversity—publishing staffs are far less diverse than America at large. (In a chapter of What Editors Do, Chris Jackson of One World writes eloquently of why this is a serious issue.) It is not just a matter of social justice, when talented candidates don’t get hired or promoted. It’s a problem for the industry, which is often out of step with the tastes and interests of the reading population.

Katharine O'Moore-Klopf

Katharine O’Moore-Klopf (Freelance editor specializing in medical & life science books): I have been concerned about the loss of respect for or loss of knowledge about the value of developmental editing, line editing, and copyediting. As publishing has become more about the financial bottom line than about quality, editing has come to be seen as less of a necessity than it once was. Part of this is because editors in general have been self-effacing, thinking it almost improper to talk about the value of their role in publishing. That must change. Editors of all kinds must speak out in every venue possible to explain what it is they do and why it’s important to the quality of books.

Diana Gill

Diana Gill: I think it's fairly clear that the big 5 will continue to contract and tighten their programs, with all the commensurate effects and spinning of publishing's own wheel of fortune for people at those houses, and for authors new and old. I hope smaller and indie presses continue to provide some alternatives and ideally grow to counteract the contraction.

Susan Ferber: I think we have taken for granted what an incredible development print on demand has meant for publishers, authors, and readers.  There is no need to declare books out of print anymore; we can literally make work available forever, which is a development on par with the printing press in my mind.  I think the death of the print book has been the most overhyped negative in the publishing world.  This has been augured and feared for so long, and for new generations of readers, it is so heartening to see that they love the print form.  It is enduring and old technology can and does have value. 

Susan Ferber

Jane Friedman:  I am encouraged by the new data-oriented research and tools that help publishers and authors better speak to, connect, and market directly to readers. Direct-to-consumer knowledge and marketing has been the Achilles heel for traditional publishers, particularly when compared to Amazon's capabilities, but it really feels like the industry is making some progress. 

As an author-advocate, I wish publishers would take more seriously the need to offer authors more communication and education on book marketing. I know it's not possible for publishers to give all their titles A-list marketing treatment, but by far the biggest complaint I hear from authors is that no one told them or prepared them for what the publisher would or would not do. Greater transparency would be so helpful.

 [BookExop photo via Chicago Tribune]