Setting up the bazooka

There are two kinds of setups possible in a story: First, things that need to be established in order for the reader to understand or accept them as believable, and second, things the reader is supposed to remember without realizing how relevant they are until a surprise twist or revelation in the story. Most of the “how to set things up” advice for writers focuses on the second variety, because planting clues is how one pulls off plot twists and murder mysteries, so today I’m going to talk about the first sort of set-up: establishing key story elements in advance.

Having the hero, in the final confrontation with the villain, unexpectedly pull a previously-unmentioned bazooka out from under his trench coat and blow the villain away, is not a cool surprising plot twist. It’s an unbelievably convenient writer-ex-machina solution. In order for this to work, something has to be established well before that final scene—either the existence of the bazooka, or the hero’s unlikely ability to pull random large things out of his trench coat at need (which happens all the time in cartoons), or both. And you don’t want the reader to miss it, because if they do, that confrontation scene is not going to make sense.

That’s what establishing something is—it’s putting it front and center, because the reader needs not to miss it. To put it another way, setting up something by establishing it is the flip side of Chekov’s famous statement about the gun on the mantelpiece. Yes, if you hang a gun on the mantelpiece in Act I, someone needs to fire it by the end of Act III…but if someone needs to fire a gun at the end of Act III, you have to hang it over the mantelpiece in Act one.

That means that setting up the bazooka comes in two parts: 1) establishing its presence in the story, and the hero’s ability to use it, and 2) arranging for its appearance at the climactic moment of the story. Establishing the bazooka is the equivalent of hanging it on the mantelpiece—it places the bazooka and the hero’s skills in the story, as something the reader takes for granted, rather than as something they are expected to miss. Arranging for the bazooka’s use at the climax of the story is more likely to involve the clues-and-red-herrings method, because if it is too obvious, the climax becomes too easy.

Establishing something is pretty straightforward. In Raiders of the Lost Ark, Indiana Jones encounters a python early on, and reacts very badly, establishing his fear of snakes. Boromir’s speech at the Council of Elrond establishes his ideas about using the One Ring rather than destroying it. Establishing the existence of the bazooka is similarly straightforward, with lots of options. The writer could, quite literally, hang it over a fireplace and draw attention to it (surely the characters would notice and comment on such an unusual decoration). Or perhaps the hero visits a shooting range with his old army buddy, and after missing the target the buddy says, “That’s why I prefer bazookas” and the hero replies “You prefer bazookas because we only had one and I was the one who always fired it.” Then, somewhere in mid-book, the hero and buddy are pinned down and the hero says, “Now we could really use a bazooka,” and the buddy replies, “I still have one in my basement,” and the hero says, “Even if that’s true, it probably wouldn’t work. You never were any good at maintenance.”

Sometimes, the writer wants to establish the bazooka without making it blatantly obvious, right from the start, that the hero is going to blow the villain up with the bazooka. Their first instinct is usually to try to hide the existence of the bazooka, but this is unlikely to work well. Bazookas are too obvious. Successfully hiding one means that it will be an unbelievable surprise when the hero pulls it out at the story climax. What the writer can do instead is to provide a secondary purpose for the bazooka’s existence—a subplot or bit of characterization—that establishes the bazooka and the hero’s skills. The whacky army buddy who keeps a bazooka in his basement might have a PTSD flashback and have to be talked down from actually using the bazooka for some reason, resulting in someone saying, “Right, I’ll just put this somewhere safe,” and the bazooka disappearing until the climax, apparently having served its story-purpose. Or the banter between the buddies could be done in such a way as to imply that all the bazooka talk is nothing but an inside joke, until the key moment becomes an “I told you I kept it” gotcha.

Establishing key elements in a story is usually best done early. J. K. Rowling is a master at this—for instance, she establishes Harry’s ability to talk to snakes in the first Harry Potter book, where it functions as a demonstration that he has weird magical abilities that his relatives dislike and that he doesn’t really understand or know how to use. By the second book, it’s simply a memorable bit of background that neither Harry nor the reader immediately connects with the voice in the walls that only Harry can hear (but when the connection finally gets made, the reader accepts it because Harry’s ability to speak to snakes was established in the first book). Similarly, McGonagall’s ability to turn into a cat is presented in the first book as a way to secretly watch the Dursleys, then reemphasized as an important Transfiguration skill during Harry’s first class with her. By the time it becomes a key plot element in the third book, it’s fully established as part of the accepted background and easy to overlook at first, without the writer needing to actually hide it. House elves are introduced as an important plot element in the second book, only to become even more important elements in books five and seven. And so on.