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, more subtle).
On the most basic level, a plant is showing the gun in the first act if you’re going to use it in the third act (this principle is known as “Chekov’s Gun”). But plants can be much more than that, and serve many different story functions.
Because almost everyone has seen the movie, I always use the classic example of a plant from the first sequence of Raiders of the Lost Ark: Indy freaking out about the snake on the plane. The PLANT is cleverly hidden because we think it’s just a comic moment — this big, bad hero just survived a maze of lethal booby traps and an entire tribe of warriors trying to kill him — and then he wimps out about a little old snake. (Also of course this is a phallic joke, just in case we didn’t notice Harrison Ford’s hotness.)
But the real PAYOFF comes way later when Salla slides the stone slab off the entrance to the tomb, and Indy shines the light down into the pit — to reveal a live mass of thousands of coiling snakes. It’s so much later in the film that we’ve completely forgotten that Indy has a pathological fear of snakes, but that’s what makes it all so funny. (Of course it’s also a suspense builder in this case: the descent into the tomb is that much more scary because we’re feeling Indy’s revulsion.)
It’s a big seductive game to play with your readers/audience, and an audience eats it up.
Plants and payoffs are often painstakingly engineered and deliberately woven into the plotline for maximum effect.
But they’re very, very often developed in rewrites, so don’t freak out if you haven’t been thinking about them! There’s plenty of time to weave them in. Once you’ve written your first draft, you can start looking for what your subconscious has already set up, and engineer the payoffs – or reverse engineer a set up to make a payoff play.
I’ve been meaning to post on this concept since I watched Saltburn. I love the movie for its terrific casting/performances and sheer shameless decadence, its stunning SETPIECES, and all those pretty, pretty boys. But beyond all that, it might have one of the best NEW WAY OF LIFE scenes I’ve ever seen in a movie, up there with the exhilaratingly romantic final scenes of Romancing the Stone and Sense & Sensibility.
——SPOILERS for Saltburn——
In the long, seven minute end, Barry Keoghan (as Oliver Quick) dances naked through Saltburn, the ancestral mansion he has acquired by killing off the family it belongs to one by one - all to the giddy soundtrack of “Murder on the Dancefloor.” He has achieved both his outer and inner DESIRE: the house (along with what’s left of the family’s fortune). In this final scene he’s essentially making love to the house, to put it euphemistically, and it’s perfectly obvious that he intends to out-decadence the decadence that has come before.
The scene is so joyfully audacious that it inspired a viral craze of TikTokers recreating it.
Now, I’ve complained about the too-longness of Saltburn (especially the over-explaining in Act III), but I enjoyed every second of that end.
And a huge reason it works so well, and is such a satisfying conclusion, is that it was SET UP, or PLANTED, early on in the film, when gorgeous, wealthy Felix (Jacob Elordi) takes Oliver on a breezy tour of the house, referring flippantly to the ‘dead rels’ in the paintings and the priceless furniture. Oliver’s triumphant and far more sensual recreation of that tour needed that previous, planted scene to resonate the way it does. In that first scene, Felix’s wealth seems both incredible and completely unattainable, and we take that tour from Oliver’s point of view of stunned envy.
In the final, naked dance through the house, we realize that this was Oliver’s PLAN: he intended this end all the way back in that first house tour. As impossible and unattainable as it seemed, he got it.
It’s the audience’s RECOGNITION of the scene, how it is repeating the earlier scene but with a twist that tells so much more, that makes it so exciting. Audiences and readers love to be rewarded for paying attention (the ancient Greek story guru Aristotle called this Anagnorisis).
Full story breakdowns of Romancing the Stone and Sense & Sensibility in the workbooks: Stealing Hollywood , Writing Love