Promises, Progress, and Payoff: Earning A Story

Developing a skillset often comes as a double-edged sword.  You may have more ability, but you also recognize flaws where previously you had only blissful ignorance.  As I learn more about writing and the storytelling process, I see its effect trickle into everything story related.  One unfortunate casualty?  Movies and television shows.  In particular, movies and shows that don’t earn their story.  Let me explain.

I’m going to steal liberally from Brandon Sanderson’s teachings here, but seeing as he’s one of world’s most successful authors, I feel it’s appropriate to crib from him.  At its core, a story needs three things: promises, progress, and payoff.  Promises are what you layout at the beginning to hook the audience, progress shows the characters and plot working towards those promises, and payoff is when we get the reward at the end.  Simple, right?

Simple, yes.  Easy, no.  After all, we don’t consume media for simplicity.  We consume it to be entertained.  If your promise is too modest, the progress unchallenged, or the payoff anticlimactic, your story flops onto the deck like a dead fish, one glaring eye staring upward as if to say “Why, brother?”

This understanding, I’m beginning to realize, is ruining media for me.  Take the new Percy Jackson show.  [Fair warning, spoilers for episode two ahead].  There is a scene where he beats three children of the god of war, Ares, in a sword fight.  It’s supposed to be a triumphant scene, but instead it made me roll my eyes so hard I got nauseous.  Let’s break it down with the three steps: promises, progress, and payoff.

We see Percy get bullied by the lead Ares kid early in the episode, then again midway through.  The inherent promise is that eventually, they’ll have a confrontation and—since we’re rooting for Percy—it’s one he’ll win.  The payoff is the conflict itself, in this case having Percy defeat the bully and her thuglets.  Connect those two dots with some progress and you have a nice, tidy moment for the audience to celebrate.

There’s only one problem: the show does nothing to show any progress.  In fact, it does the opposite, spending significant time showing Percy failing miserably at every skill he tries his hand at.  But then—out of nowhere—he can hold his own with a sword he’s barely touched against three children of Ares who have clearly trained for fights like this.  No lead up as to how he could do that, or where those skills may have come from, or any sort of progress that would cause a reasonable person to think Percy would do anything but get his teeth kicked in fighting these three.  Instead of triumph, dead fish flop. 

These moments pop up everywhere for me now, and it’s both satisfying and frustrating.  It’s satisfying because I can see my own ability to recognize the tools of storytelling better, which hopefully translates to my own writing.  It’s frustrating because most shows and movies are littered with these dead fish flops, and it’s hard to unsee rotting Pisces. 

It’s easy to be an armchair writer critiquing a story from afar.  It’s much harder to pull off good storytelling.  I imagine it gets even more difficult when the writer doesn’t actually have the last say in things like is the case with visual media.  But it can be done, and it should be done.  My hope for future Netflix binges depends on it.