Wattpad India Awards 2021

Learn: Setup

When you look back on some of your favorite stories, you'll often come up with a mind-bending moment that changed how you viewed everything. You thought the story was going one way and then suddenly it went another.

Or perhaps it was the time that everything came together. Finally, you got to see all of your favorite characters show up to defeat evil or the couple kissed, even though you knew all along it was going to happen.

These huge highs are so addicting that writers will want to pack their stories with them, sometimes without putting in the work for each one. Remember when we spoke about increasing tension? How the next goal always needs to be bigger, how the stakes need to keep rising?

Those 'stakes' come from set-ups. You can't have the conflict of the hero's family being in danger if the family was never introduced. You can't have a side character die heroically and expect it to be impactful if the emotional bond was never set up.

Let's talk about all the work that needs to be done in order to earn those moments.

Set-up

All big moments need to be promised to the audience and they are going to be established in the opening chapters. Is there a villain? They'll need to be defeated. Is your character single and just bumped into a hottie? They're gonna get together.

As the reader, a promise has been made to you: you'll get the answer by the end.

This notion of set-up is present for all parts of a story. It works for the overall narrative, and it also applies to character arcs and even to smaller scenes. Everything you name or focus on in your story is a clue to your reader that something will happen. The more interesting or exciting that thing is, and the more time you spend on it, the more the reader expects something to happen with it.

This manifests in the rule of Chekhov's Gun:

"If you say in the first chapter that there is a rifle hanging on the wall, in the second or third chapter it absolutely must go off." - Chekhov.

The principle that states every element in a dramatic work must be relevant. That whatever else we do as writers we must not hold "false promises" out to our readers.

Consciously or not, we're always loading Chekhov's Gun. Every sentence we write is a rifle hung on the wall. Sooner or later it will - and it must - go off. In this scenario, the gun is the set-up, a building block that adds context to your future pay-off.

Again, there are cases of misdirects which are used to make the reader think something is going to happen when something entirely different ends up happening. We'll get into that later.

The topic of set-up can be tricky. The simplest way to go about it is ensuring that your big future plot point doesn't appear out of nowhere, that it has some base and some foreshadowing.

  

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Today, we're going to leave you with the winning stories from the previous editions of Wattpad India Awards. If you haven't read them yet, now's the time to do so!

Wattpad India Awards 2020 Winners

Wattpad India Awards 2019 Winners

Happy reading :)