Thursday, April 08, 2010

Plants and Payoffs

I’ve been taking a look at this second act thing, and you can tell me if you think I’m way off base, but it seems to me in some ways that the first half of the second act, II:1, is both the most variable act of any story, and the most specific to whatever genre the story is.

In a romantic comedy, besides throwing your hero and heroine together, and creating that chemistry that everyone is looking for in one of those stories, you’ll probably also be flitting around to your various subplots to develop those love stories.

In an action story, you’re very likely to have a training sequence and/or gathering the team sequence.

In a detective story, your detective or cop or amateur sleuth will be investigating, following clues, lining up suspects.

In a horror story - there will be increasing supernatural occurrences or attacks by a human or supernatural predator.

It’s a new theory of mine – you can keep an eye out in your own analyses and see what you think.

This is also an act that establishes a lot of Plants and Payoffs (as does Act 1), so we're going to talk about that, today.



























So, please – any great examples for us?


How To Write A Novel From Start To Finish: previous posts


What is genre?

What's your premise?

The Price
(more on premise)

What is High Concept?

The Dream Journal

Three-Act Structure Review and Assignments

The Three-Act, Eight-Sequence Structure

The Index Card Method and Story Structure Grid

Elements of Act One

Story Elements Checklist for brainstorming Index Cards

What KIND Of Story Is It?

Elements of Act Two, Part 1


Screenwriting Tricks For Authors
now available on Kindle and for PC and Mac.


Gene said...

How about Boo Radley - not just him, but also the tree, and Jem's broken arm? Throughout To Kill a Mockingbird, we've been on the side of right, we think. But when we finally see Boo, we realize how wrong we've been. Suddenly, we're the townspeople, the prejudical ones, the ones we've disliked, all along. :)

Constance Burris said...

I've been watching Willow as one of my "ten" and at the begining of Willow's journey he is given an acorn that if he throws it will turn someone to stone. All through the movie he messes up and never gets it to work. At the end he throws an acorn at the villian and it looks like it will finally work and you get a really strong "yeah, he finally did it" moment, but it turns out to be a fake plant and I was so dissapointed when it didn't work.

I thought the set up was pretty damn clever.

G.R. Yeates said...

Hi Alex,

An example that springs to mind for me is from A Nightmare on Elm Street. The Plant being when Nancy and Glen have a seemingly throwaway discussion about the Balinese way of conscious dreaming. The Payoff being when Nancy uses this as her means of defeating Krueger.

Yeah, I know, my genre is showing again. Ooh-err missus etc ;-)


Gayle Carline said...

Okay, I'm watching A Place in the Sun right now - the plants! OMG, the plants! In Monty Clift's first conversation with Shelley Winters, she tells him she can't swim. Then Liz points out the drowning on Loon Lake. And as Monty and Shelley leave the courthouse, where they couldn't get married due to the holiday, they pass an open door to a courtroom - why was it open? Wowser.

ssas said...

I just had to put a big plant in my WIP. I'm hoping I shielded it well enough with character assassination that the reader forgets all about it.

I've been watching Supernatural, and it's chock full of them, though of course not one comes to mind at the moment. :)

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ScreenwriterChic said...

Thank you so much for posting this in your blog. I love to read it. You're absolutely correct in plants and payoffs. They are what makes a good script GREAT!

I liked Chinatown, where Gittes looks into her eye and says she's got a fleck of something in it, yet she's the only one who sees clearly...and winds up having the bullet shoot her through it later...There's more to that story of course..."Bad for glass" so on and so forth.

Thanks for posting blogs!

Alexandra Sokoloff said...

Gene, yes, I'd say that all of that is a good example of how a plant can turn into a whole intricate plot line, like the one I was describing in Jerry Maguire.

And Mockingbird, we really are forced into the experience of prejudice.

Alexandra Sokoloff said...

Constance, it's been forever since I've seen Willow but that would really piss me off. Is there really no payoff to that acorn? Or does he understand that he has to do it himself?

Alexandra Sokoloff said...

Ooh, Greg, that's a great example. That throwaway quality is important to hide a plant.

Alexandra Sokoloff said...

Gayle, now I HAVE to see that film... can't believe I haven't.

Alexandra Sokoloff said...

SSAS - yeah, this is where you need beta readers - to make sure your plants aren't too obvious. It's a tricky balance...

Alexandra Sokoloff said...

Had to allow that Anonymous spam because it's weirdly like the story I'm writing. Cracked me up.

Alexandra Sokoloff said...

Screenwriter Chic, I agree. Chinatown is just a textbook for everything about storytelling.