Setup & Payoff,
Climax & Resolution

79}EPIPHANIES & EXPLOSIONS

One test of a story’s success is whether it exhausts its own possibilities, and how it exhausts them.

Think of a fireworks display. In his arsenal the pyrotechnician has Roman candles and bottle rockets as well as multi-tube devices packed with pounds of colorful explosives. Just when we think we’ve witnessed the loudest, biggest blast of all, he treats us to one even bigger.

Our stories and novels should work the same way, with nothing “set up” that doesn’t “pay off ” later. Small payoffs lead to greater ones, and finally to the greatest payoff of all.

Not every story works this way, of course; not every story comes packed with explosives. All of Joyce’s stories in Dubliners, like many stories by Chekhov and Cheever, rely on subtle emotional upheavals or awakenings—what Joyce called epiphanies: moments of sudden deep awareness that alter a character’s view of the world and his place in it.

Typically, some sort of climax ends or resolves the crisis brought on by the inciting incident. In my story “Swimming,” a seventy-two-year-old man’s marriage is threatened when he meets—or thinks he has met—a younger woman named Juliet while swimming in the lake where he and his wife, Dorothy, are summering. The inciting incident is his first encounter with the mysterious younger woman. Will Frank be tempted into an affair with Juliet (who also swims; his wife doesn’t)? To save his marriage from stasis, Frank decides, he must teach Dorothy to swim. The crisis is resolved when, in his attempt to do so, he nearly drowns her. This scene gives the story its climax.

Not all stories will blast us with explosives, and not all stories resolve themselves neatly. Gentle stories can have gentle resolutions and may move us without concussing us. But explosive or gentle, our stories must have a climax.

80} SETUP & PAYOFF:
THE BOMB UNDER THE TABLE

In a short story, everything is either setup or payoff. So when a writer opens a story with a long description of the curtains blowing in his heroine’s bedroom, the reader has every right to expect those curtains to pay off somewhere later in the story. If not, we have a setup with no payoff. And when, in a scene where she finally confronts her puritanical mother, sixteen-year-old Jenny tells Mom how she kissed her new boyfriend, we get the opposite: payoff with no setup. The confrontation would have worked much better had we been led in some way to anticipate it.

Without setup, there can be little or no suspense. Hitchcock gives the example of a movie scene set at a board of directors’ meeting. We watch the members of the board going about their business, making motions and doing whatever it is that board members do, and suddenly—BOOM! There’s an enormous explosion; everyone is dead. Unknown to both the board and the audience, a bomb had been ticking away under the table. A shocking scene, and one that’s all climax with no suspense; all payoff with no setup. To inject suspense into the scene, in the midst of the board meeting the director would need to cut away to a close-up of the bomb ticking under the table. Without such an establishment shot, there’s nothing for us to anticipate, no cause for suspense.

In the story mentioned above, the one with the curtains, what moment is being set up in the first scene? Where do those blowing curtains point? Maybe they point to the scene where Jenny finally confronts her largely absent mother, who is dying of lung cancer at home, and whom she must now take care of. The curtains blowing in the first paragraph? Do they breathe for her mother’s ailing lungs? Or maybe that breeze is the fresh air of catharsis.

Chekhov offers the example of the gun over the mantle in the first act of a play which, to justify itself, must be discharged in the third act. In Flannery O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find,” the story’s first paragraph alerts us, almost in passing, to the news that a convict known as the Misfit has escaped from the federal penitentiary and is headed for Florida, where a grandmother, the story’s protagonist, and her family happen to be vacationing. What are the odds of Grandma and the Misfit encountering each other? In real life, pretty low. In a work of fiction, 100 percent.

Less blatant examples will serve. Early in Joyce’s most famous story, “The Dead,” we read, “Gabriel’s warm trembling fingers tapped the cold pane of the window” —which sentence sets up the tapping of snow on another window in the story’s ultimate paragraph (“A few light taps upon the pane made him turn to the window.”).

Ideally in a work of fiction, and especially in shorter works, every line is a life support system for the final scene, image, or line. “Call me Ishmael,” with its Biblical overtones, sets up “And I only am escaped to tell thee” (Job 1.).

Try and see to it that the climaxes that bloom at the ends of your stories have been seeded in your opening pages, and vice versa. Or better still: Look for the seeds that are already planted there, but that haven’t germinated.

81} REVERSALS ‘R’ US:
A TOY STORE ANTICLIMAX

A successful resolution thwarts our expectations; it doesn’t (fully) satisfy them.

I’m reading the story of a single mother who learns that her fifteen-year-old daughter has been secretly seeing an older boy (a man, practically) and lying about it. She discovers the stranger’s identity and sets off, with her seven-year-old son Max in tow, in a blind rage to the toy store where her daughter’s lover works, to give the cradle-robber a piece of her mind.

Such a setup raises obvious expectations: a violent confrontation between enraged mother and the lothario. Maybe she’ll slap him in the face, or strike him with her purse, or simply threaten to have his reproductive parts fricasseed and served to him for brunch if he so much as sets eyes on her daughter again. Since these are our obvious expectations, it stands to reason that they will not be satisfied. Something—but what?—must offer some resistance to these “logical” outcomes.

Inside the Toys ‘R’ Us, Max wants every toy he sees. To placate him, Mom grabs a shopping cart and lets him fill it. It takes the mother forever to track down the cradle-robber. By the time she locates her quarry, the shopping cart totters with toys. Behind the counter she finds not a lothario or hulking ape, but Albert: a shy, awkward, acne-ridden, bespectacled eighteen-year-old.

Payoff ? Not quite. Even a shy eighteen-year-old can be the ruin of a young girl. Albert’s “sweetness” doesn’t in itself resolve anything. There needs to be a more satisfying resolution. What can Mom do? Bribe? Threaten? Plead? Make Albert swear he won’t lay a finger on her daughter till she’s reached the age of majority? Albert is either an impediment to action, or a gun waiting to go off, or both.

Or maybe Mom responds so favorably to something in him that she ends up wanting him for herself.

Whatever the payoff, more must happen than Mom deciding that Albert is okay after all. The setup is too good for the story to end with a whimper. Having won Mom over, perhaps Abert asks her for a date? That should get the ball rolling again.

But whatever you do, remember Chekhov’s gun, and don’t let it backfire—or worse, go off with a whimper.