Wired for Story: The Writer's Guide to Using Brain Science to Hook Readers from the Very First Sentence (30 page)

What you want the reader to think is
Gee, I understand James speaks Swahili because it was the only language offered in his high
school, and he couldn’t graduate without it, but something tells me that by the end of the story he’s going to be glad it worked out that way
. Which means, of course, that if the whole Swahili thing
doesn’t
come up again, it will turn into one of those lonely elephants, wandering the halls of the story, looking for something to do (damage, most likely).

Setups are, of course, often far more intricate and involving than James’s speaking Swahili—which is, after all, just a single piece of supporting information. Often a setup triggers an entire subplot, motive, or way to interpret what’s happening, as we’ll soon see. That said, it’s important to point out from the get-go that the payoff the reader then anticipates doesn’t have to be correct. Far from it. Very often the
true
meaning of the setup is clear only in hindsight. As we discussed earlier, in Hitchcock’s masterpiece
Vertigo
, we’re set up to believe the enigmatic Madeleine is the beautiful, disturbed wife of the man who hired ex-cop Scotty Ferguson to protect her, only to later discover that she is actually a shopgirl who’s been hired to pose as Madeleine. As we’ve already seen, the catch in this type of scenario is that when the payoff comes, everything that happened up to that moment to support the false assumption must now, in hindsight, support the new twist. As Raymond Chandler wisely noted, “The solution, once revealed, must seem to be inevitable.”
⁷

There’s no avoiding this truth. So keep in mind that to the reader,
everything
in a story is either a setup, a payoff, or the road in between.

Readers are always on the lookout for patterns, so the last thing you want is for the reader to decide something is a setup that isn’t—and worse, to act on it. It’s like when the creepy guy in the next cubicle decides that the way you always ignore him proves you’re secretly in love with him, so of course he should make his move. In a story, this translates to dragging some irrelevant bit of information through your
otherwise carefully constructed tale, undermining the assumptions that you
do
want the reader to make.

I can’t stress this too strongly: readers’ cognitive unconscious assumes that everything in a story is there on a need-to-know basis, so they take it for granted that everything you present is part of a pattern. They believe that each event, fact, or action will have critical significance. Thus it’s astonishingly easy to mistake a digression or a random unnecessary fact for a setup. To make matters worse, because its relevance to what’s happening
now
seems shaky, readers take that to mean it will have even more significance
later
. And so it becomes part of the filter through which they run the meaning of everything that happens from that point on.

For instance, let’s say the protagonist, Nora, mentions in passing to her husband, Lou, that Betty from next door spent all day loudly berating that good-for-nothing gun-toting boyfriend of hers. Now, as far as the
writer
is concerned, Nora might have only brought it up to explain why she has such a pounding headache and so can’t help Lou search for their missing Labradoodle pup, Rufus. But chances are the
reader
will think,
What? Betty has a gun-toting boyfriend? I bet he has something to do with that poor pup’s disappearance. And hey, what happened to Nora’s sister, Kathy? She hasn’t been around for a while, not since that night she had dinner at Betty’s; I wonder if.…

Or worse, the reader can’t even figure out how the information
might
apply. What would a gun-toting thug be doing in a gated Quaker commune, anyway? Thus part of the reader’s mind lags behind, busily chewing over what the gun-toting guy could possibly mean, while another part soldiers on, reading about Nora and Lou’s puppy. But as researchers at Stanford have proven, contrary to popular wisdom, effective mental multitasking is not actually possible—the brain, as it turns out, can’t process two strings of incoming information at the same time. According to neuroscientist Anthony Wagner, when trying to focus on multiple sources of information coming from the external world or emerging out of memory, people are “not able to filter out what’s not
relevant to their current goal.”
⁸
Thus, while the reader’s mind mulls over the import of Betty’s boyfriend, the significance of what’s
actually
happening on the page begins to fade. It’s a bit like listening to someone speaking in a very heavy accent. You have to strain so hard to make out the words, you miss what they’re trying to tell you. Soon the reader has no idea what’s going on, and not long after, ceases to care.

It’s not even a choice; it’s innate: the brain is wired to go offline—that is, ignore the real world and slip into a fictional one—only if it believes the story will be of benefit by providing info that’ll help it navigate this cockeyed world of ours. Once engaged, it flips the switch that filters out actual reality. When that belief is shattered—say, by setups that go nowhere—reality floods back in.
⁹

With that in mind, the question becomes: what exactly does a real setup look like? Let’s pal around with a few of them to get the feel of what we’re talking about.

Sometimes setups don’t read like setups at all. For instance,
Die Hard
opens with protagonist John McClane on a plane that’s just landed at LAX. A New York City cop, McClane refused to relocate when his wife got a big promotion that required that she move to LA. She took the kids and left. He hopes to win her back. He’s exhausted—and clearly glad that the plane is no longer airborne. His seatmate, an older salesman, notices McClane’s relief and pegs him as a novice flyer. He then gives McClane a sage bit of advice on how to beat jet lag: stand on a rug barefoot and “make fists with your toes.”
¹⁰
Uh-huh
. It’s a nice bit of comic relief, and McClane’s polite but skeptical reaction tells us something about how he sees the world.

The scene’s subtext is clear: beneath McClane’s dislike of flying is an even deeper dislike of being out of his element. New York City is a far cry from sunny Los Angeles, especially on the day before Christmas. The
question is, is there
anything
about his interchange with the salesman that screams “Setup!”? Not really. It’s told us something about McClane, and technically that’s enough. What’s more, there’s no red flag saying,
Look at me—I matter more than you think
, which is great, because that’s the last thing you want a setup to do. And this
is
a setup.

Because once McClane gets to the Christmas party at his wife’s office and finds himself alone and tense in a plush executive bathroom, he takes his shoes off and tries it. He smiles, amazed that it really works. He’s still blissfully making fists with his toes when he hears gunfire. With no time to do anything but grab his Beretta, he rushes into the hallway to check it out.
Barefoot
.

And so he spends the rest of the movie running through minefields of broken glass, bleeding. That opening scene? Beyond being entertaining, and telling us something about McClane, it was a setup that paid off by making his road to becoming a hero that much more difficult.

You might wonder whether setups like that are worth the trouble. Couldn’t McClane simply have taken his shoes off anyway? Couldn’t he have muttered something about how your feet seem to swell while you fly, and it’s such a relief to slip off your shoes for a minute? Absolutely. He even could have accidentally splashed water on them as he washed his face, and so taken them off to let them dry. But for the audience, both of those scenarios would have lacked something that the opening scene provided: a small “aha!” moment—that delicious sense of understanding when we grasp the specific (and sometimes deeper)
why
behind a character’s action. It’s this that allowed us to savor the irony:
If only that guy on the plane had kept his trap shut, McClane wouldn’t be leaving such a bloody trail everywhere he goes
.

Setups, when done well, read like fate.

While this is a minor twist in
Die Hard
, Caroline Leavitt’s novel
Girls in Trouble
offers a far more fleeting, yet substantial example. The novel begins in Boston and revolves around the relationship between Sara, an unmarried sixteen-year-old who is pregnant, and George and Eva, the couple who adopt her baby. It’ll be an open adoption, they
promise. Sara will be welcome anytime. And before the birth, this is indeed true. George and Eva, hungry to spend as much time with Sara as possible—both because they genuinely care for her and because they fear she might change her mind—shower her with love and attention. However, once the baby is born, Sara’s dependence on them becomes overwhelming. What’s more, her presence begins to threaten Eva, who wants to feel that she alone is the baby’s mother. There is a palpable sense of trouble brewing, and the reader is sure that sooner or later it will come to a head.

In the midst of this, George, a dentist, feeling the strain of his new situation—his unexpectedly fierce love for the baby, Sara’s neediness, Eva’s growing need to distance herself from Sara—reflects on his day:

This passage is on page 98. George doesn’t think of Tom, or Florida, again until page 169. But throughout the seventy pages in between, the reader does. Because that one offhand reference to Tom’s urging George to move to Florida leaps out as a setup, a revelatory detail that puts the reader on notice. We sense this, even though there is absolutely
nothing in the way it’s presented that says,
Pay attention, remember me
. But we do anyway. Why? Because the story itself has already supplied us with a context—a pattern—into which this tidbit fits neatly. We know how untenable the situation is, and that it’s only going to get worse. We’ve been anticipating that something will have to give, but until George thought about Tom in Florida, we weren’t sure how it might actually play out.

From that moment on, we suspect that George and Eva will move away. And we begin anticipating how Sara will react when they do. Thus this small setup, this tiny nugget, takes on a much greater significance, affecting how the reader interprets everything that happens in the seventy pages between the setup (George’s first fleeting thought of Florida) and the payoff (when he once again remembers Tom, buys Tom’s dental practice, and moves his family to Boca Raton without a word to Sara).

This isn’t to say that there aren’t times that the thought of Florida might slip the reader’s mind or when she might wonder whether George and Eva are really going to move after all. If setups always made specific payoffs inevitable from the moment they appeared, they’d stifle anticipation rather than spur it. What they often do is illuminate a possibility. Sure, that possibility might be exactly what happens—George, Eva, and the baby do move to Florida—but along the road from setup to payoff, the reader always has the sense that it might go either way. What keeps us reading is the building desire to find out.

We know anticipation feels really good, and that what readers love to hunt for is the emerging path from setups to payoffs. After all, a big part of the pleasure of reading is recognizing, interpreting, and then
connecting the dots so the pattern emerges. To make that possible, there are three basic rules it behooves writers to know.

This means the setup is not allowed to piggyback on the payoff. Piggybacking occurs when we learn about a problem
at the moment
it’s been solved. Talk about draining the tension, killing the conflict, deflating the suspense, and making sure the reader has nothing to anticipate! Thus, we hear that Amy’s front tooth has been successfully reattached at the very moment we learn both that Morris accidentally knocked it out last night during a rousing game of gin rummy, and that if the dentist hadn’t been able to schedule emergency surgery, Amy’s lifelong dream would have been dashed, because she would’ve had to try out for the Miss Perfect Smile Contest this morning sans her front tooth. Great for Amy, boring for us.

Now imagine the tension, conflict, and suspense had we been there the instant the tooth flew out of Amy’s mouth, knowing it’s only six short hours until the Miss Perfect Smile Contest, wondering how she’ll ever find a dentist at one a.m. in Peoria, not to mention what this will do to her relationship with Morris, which was pretty shaky to begin with.