Plants and Payoffs
Screenwriting Tricks for Authors
Plants and Payoffs are a delicious storytelling trick that filmmakers are particularly aware of and deft at. I very strongly encourage you novelists to start watching movies for this element, to use in your own work.
Other names for this technique are Setup/Reveal, Plant/Reveal, Setup/Payoff, and sometimes FORESHADOWING (which can be a bit different, mor…