Extraordinary Setups by Scott Fitzgerald Gray

Converting real-life experiences to literature is the most harrowing thing any writer can do, because for the most part, real life doesn’t follow the rules of drama very well. Maybe you get up in the morning and feel your day, your work, your week, your relationships naturally split themselves up into a cohesive act structure. Maybe the annoying people in your life just naturally slip into orders of villainy straight from TVTropes.org. But for me, life has always felt less like scripted drama and more like an improv exercise conducted in some language I don’t actually speak.

My newest novel is called We Can Be Heroes, and like all my stories, it’s complete fiction. It’s a kind of high-school coming-of age SF techno-thriller whose every moment and plot point is drawn from my feverish imagination. Every beat is made up, every scene is a complete fabrication. Except that the narrator and point-of-view character of the book is Scott Gray, a pseudointellectual high school gamer with a woefully Byronesque heart and a self-destructive chip on his shoulder. And in every important way, this Scott is the same pseudointellectual high school gamer with a woefully Byronesque heart and a self-destructive chip on his shoulder that I was in high school — even as nothing he does ever actually happened to me, and most of what he says are simply things I wish I’d said, long after my saying them would have made any difference.

The Scott of the book is me and not-me in other words — and in the course of writing that version of Scott, I managed to trip across one of those little bits of “Eureka!” understanding that are the lot of the writer’s life.

One of the most important concepts in fiction writing (and something that gets beaten into you fairly relentlessly if you started out in screenwriting, as I did) is the idea of setup and payoff. In every story, events are layered and connected to each other by unseen threads of things leading into other things. Events cause other events to happen. Changes to the world of the story, changes to the characters’ situations, create a new context against which later changes play out — they resonate and ripple out into the narrative and push that narrative into other directions. And I know that none of this is new information, but when we look at our stories, it’s important to understand that how well a particular beat or plot point plays out often has nothing to do with how the beat works in isolation. It depends on how well the payoff at the center of that beat has been set up.

Working as a story editor, I experience the following on a regular basis. A writer is having problems with a Big Important Scene toward the end of the story, and has rewritten that point a hundred times in a hundred different ways but been unable to make it work. Nine times out of ten, if you ask the writer to sum up the problem they’re having with that point, you hear how the story feels like it’s happening for the wrong reasons. Characters are doing things, characters are saying things, solely because the plot compels them to. It doesn’t feel real.

And nine times out of ten, the problem with that Big Important Scene isn’t in the scene at all. It’s in the succession of scenes that lead into that, because the Big Payoff inherent in the Big Important Scene hasn’t been properly set up.

To make the payoff feel real, the setup needs to feel real. It’s a simple rule, but like most simple rules for writing, it can be hard to see it in the midst of the process of creation.

Looked at objectively, We Can Be Heroes is a fairly over-the-top science-fiction techno-thriller. It’s got gamer geek backstory in spades. It’s got computer jargon and weapons specs. It’s got the ironic untold history of what really ended the Cold War. It’s got explosions and high-speed ground-air chase scenes galore. And it’s also got the small Western Canadian town in which I grew up, and my high school, and a group of friends as main characters who if you look at them from just the right angle might look suspiciously like certain friends of mine.

Working on We Can Be Heroes, I realized that the more I dug into my own life in the setup, the stronger the completely outlandish payoff of fictional-Scott’s life became.

The things that happen to fictional-Scott aren’t things that ever happened to me. But many of them are things that almost happened. Things that could have happened. Things that I wish had happened. Things that I thank fate and whatever gods are listening never happened. Looked at in the most metafictional way, the setup points of my life and the setup points of fictional-Scott’s life are mostly the same. The divergence in the payoff is what makes fictional-Scott’s life a whole lot more interesting than mine — but the fact that those payoffs remained anchored to bits of setup that hold the resonance of reality is what makes those moments of payoff feel real.

Now, maybe this is all kind of obvious in hindsight, and I’m sure it’s been said before by other writers far more interesting than me. But it was a bit of a revelation for me during the course of writing We Can Be Heroes, because one of the biggest challenges of that book was trying to figure out a way to tell a story containing so many touchstones to my own life and have that story mean something to other people. To make it feel real.

Some people lead lives so extraordinary (for better or for worse) that they read like the best fiction, and that’s great. And it’s not like I think my own real life has been profoundly dull because it’s actually been pretty amazing on a lot of levels. But I think for most of us, our own lives are amazing in a kind of slide-show-of-that-holiday-we-took way. The moments of our lives, the things we do, have personal meaning for us, but that personal meaning can’t ever mean the same thing to other people.

So when we look to transfer and translate the events of real life to our fiction, it’s good to remember that even the most mundane lives have extraordinary setups. And in fiction, it’s the extraordinary setup that makes the payoff real.