As promised, the written version of the talk I gave (to a tiny, self-selected audience) at Legend Haven is up at Noble Cobra Magazine:

There is a passage in C.S. Lewis’s seminal essay On Stories which has informed a lot of my approach to fiction. It comes when Prof. Lewis is trying to describe what he calls the “kappa” or hidden element in romance:

In the Poet Laureate’s Sard Harker it is the journey across the Sierras that really matters. That the man who has heard that noise in the cañon— ‘He could not think what it was. It was not sorrowful nor joyful nor terrible. It was great and strange. It was like the rock speaking’ —that this man should be later in danger of mere murder is almost an impertinence.

It is here that Homer shows his supreme excellence. The landing on Circe’s island, the sight of the smoke going up from amidst those unexplored woods, the god meeting us (‘the messenger, the slayer of Argus’)—what an anti-climax if all these had been the prelude only to some ordinary risk of life and limb! But the peril that lurks here, the silent, painless, unendurable change into brutality, is worthy of the setting.

In so describing it, he is also touching on the all-important element of atmosphere; the overall feel or tone of a story, which can make all the difference.

Taking this as a starting point, I would like to explore a related issue: what makes for a suitable payoff to a setup. As Prof. Lewis says, the ‘setup’ of the mysterious and ethereal atmosphere of Circe’s island is well matched by the ‘payoff’ of the specific danger facing Odysseus and his men, but would have been ruined if it had been only something as prosaic as, say, a band of pirates.

I would argue that the payoff can make or break a story. There are stories that I absolutely devoured while I was reading them, which then had half the joy sucked out of them by a lackluster resolution. Likewise, there are stories that I found only moderately interesting in the moment which rose to be all-time favorites that I couldn’t wait to revisit because the payoff was so good. The payoff or climax or conclusion is really the keystone of the whole plot: get this right, and audiences will overlook a lot. Get it wrong, and a whole book’s worth of great writing will feel stale.

With that in mind, let’s take a look as some examples; payoffs that worked and ones that did not and try to examine why.

For the record, I think all the works described here are overall very good. Which is what makes the excellence or disappointment of their payoff stand out all the more.

Read the rest here.