Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (31 page)

This means it can’t take place off the page, shrouded in secrecy. There are three reasons writers tend to keep the road between setup and payoff veiled, if not totally obscured. One, as we already know, is because they’re saving it all up for the big reveal. Second, they simply don’t realize they’re doing it. Thus they set up a promising storyline and then leave it to the reader to imagine how, specifically, it plays out, until somewhere down the line it resurfaces just in time for the big payoff. Often these writers are under the mistaken assumption that by letting
readers know what’s going on, they’re somehow talking down to them, and so the bulk of the story remains in the writer’s imagination.

Thus we learn that John needs to marry before his thirtieth birthday in order to get the inheritance he’s been counting on. Then, over the next several hundred pages, John goes on dates whose specifics we never hear—dates we wouldn’t be able to interpret anyway, because we have no idea what he’s looking for in a wife, or even whether he wants to marry at all. Then, at some point, John decides to marry someone for some reason, and he gets a whole lot of money. The End. Except chances are the reader will never know it, because it’s highly unlikely she’ll have stuck around that long. Point being, while we’re eager to connect the dots, we don’t want to have to invent them first.

And this brings us to the third reason writers sometimes inadvertently skimp on the “tells” necessary to establish a pattern. As the author, you know everything about your story—where it’s going, who’s really doing what to whom, and where the proverbial (and sometimes literal) bodies are buried. Because of this, you’re acutely aware of exactly what each “dot” really means and how it all fits together. But here’s the thing: your reader isn’t aware. What comes across to you as so utterly obvious that it will “give the whole thing away” is a tantalizing “tell” to the reader, who’s counting on such “tells” to be able to do what readers love best: figure out what is really going on.

I don’t mean impossible in the “he’ll try it and when he fails, it will teach him something” sense. I mean, literally impossible, so that if the protagonist himself had given it a moment’s thought, he’d have realized how ridiculous such an endeavor would be.

So how did the writer miss it?

Because the writer knew that something was going to happen to prevent the protagonist from taking more than a step or two down that
particular path, so she didn’t bother to think it all the way through. Why should she?

Because the reader will.

After all, the reader doesn’t know the protagonist isn’t going to trudge down that path to the bitter end. And if there’s one thing we know about readers, it’s that they love to anticipate what will happen next. But it doesn’t stop there; once they spot a pattern, they test its validity against their own knowledge. Thus they’re often way ahead of the protagonist. And when they figure out what the writer didn’t—that a particular payoff is not logically possible—they’re the ones who may bail.

For instance, let’s say that since kindergarten, Norbert has been secretly in love with Betsy, who’s completely blind. Unfortunately, Betsy has never thought of Norbert as anything but a good friend. Now, she’s away at Harvard, rooming with several hometown girlfriends, all of whom know Norbert and can see. Lonely, Norbert hatches a plan: he’ll apply to Harvard, get in, fake a British accent, and woo Betsy as if he were a complete stranger. The writer, however, already knows that Norbert will never get that far, because she’s seen to it that Harvard will reject him. Thus it never occurs to her that Betsy’s roommates would have instantly recognized Norbert, giving his identity away before he could utter a single
pip pip cheerio
. In short, you must make sure that what your characters
intend
to do is plausible, even if you already know that something unforeseen will thwart them before they can actually do it.

Die Hard
is a perfect story (the blood, gore, and impossible physical feats of derring-do notwithstanding). Why? Because every setup builds to a satisfying payoff. We saw how the barefoot setup-payoff worked, but there are more. Many more. In fact, every main character arcs, every subplot has a resolution. Nothing is wasted, everything is set up in advance, yet there are a million surprises along the way.

Let’s look at one particular case in point, to see how setups spur character arcs, motivation, and subplots: Al Powell, the off-duty cop who first responds to McClane’s report of gunfire at Nakatomi Plaza, has been a desk jockey since he accidentally shot a kid he’d thought was armed. Powell hasn’t been able to draw his gun in the eight years since. When he admits this to McClane, we have the feeling it’s something he hasn’t told many people. But he offers it up because the two men have developed a bond, and at the moment, things aren’t looking good for McClane, survival-wise. So when he asks Powell what got him off the street and behind a desk, Powell tells him the truth rather than hedging.

His admission is a setup. It defines his character arc, by telling us both what his fear is (he’s afraid to draw his gun for fear he’ll hurt an innocent) and what his desire is (to get back to real police work instead of pushing papers). This is what underscores and drives his subplot, which in turn plays out in service of the main story question: Will McClane, in the course of saving the day, gain enough insight to win back his wife?

Back to Powell. Throughout the film, Powell stands up for McClane against the knuckleheaded powers that be and gives him encouragement when it really does seem that all is lost. And so at the end, when it looks like all the bad guys are dead, McClane comes out of the building and the first thing he does is find Powell, hug him, and swear he wouldn’t have survived without him. Powell humbly disagrees. And he means it. He did what he was supposed to do, nothing more. Nothing heroic.

And then it happens. Karl, the one bad guy not quite accounted for, comes blazing out of the building, machine gun in hand. Karl locks eyes with McClane and levels his gun. This time McClane’s a dead duck. Except when the resounding
bang!
echoes through the stunned crowd, it’s Karl who falls dead. A reverse angle reveals that this time Powell has, indeed, saved McClane. Now, here’s the interesting thing. In the script, Powell then says out loud what we’re all thinking. That McClane was right—he wouldn’t have survived without him, after all.

Except—script be damned—in the movie Powell
doesn’t
say that. He doesn’t say anything. His eyes, his expression, register something
far deeper, something that doesn’t have anything to do with McClane at all. They say that, at last, Powell is back in the game. We don’t need to be told; we empathize so keenly that we feel it in our bones.

What makes it such a satisfying payoff is that it’s so well earned—each dot along the way upped the ante for Powell. But until that moment, although Powell had indeed gone the extra mile for McClane, he hadn’t yet been put to the test. By the time Karl comes thundering into the doorway, we know how much McClane means to Powell, and we know what Powell must overcome to protect him. And protect him he does, in one of the most touching moments of deeply felt macho bonding in the pre-bromance era.

MEMORY EVOLVED FOR A VERY GOOD REASON:
so you can find your car keys when, for the millionth time, they don’t seem to be exactly where you
know
you left them. Memory mines the information your brain has acquired in the past for anything that might help it solve the problem you’re facing in the present. So it instantly recalls the day the keys slid behind the couch cushion (damn, not there now), the time you left them dangling from the front doorknob (not there now, either), the way your teenage son tends to “borrow” your car while you’re sleeping (aha!). Thus, as with everything the brain is wired for, storing information is adaptive: it supports future decisions and judgments that cannot be known with certainty in advance.
¹
A category that sums up, well, pretty much everything except death and taxes.

In his book
Self Comes to Mind
, neuroscientist Antonio Damasio speculates that it’s thanks to the intersection of the self and memory that consciousness is able to bestow on us its ultimate gift: “the ability to navigate the future in the seas of our imagination, guiding the self craft into a safe and productive harbor.”
²
We use the past as a yardstick against which we size up the present in order to make it to tomorrow. What’s more, when we do this, sometimes it’s our evaluation of the
past
that changes in light of what we’ve since learned.
³
Memories are continually revised, along with the meaning we derive from them, so that in the future they’ll be of even more use.