Craig with you today. My topic is going to be those plants and payoffs we use when writing our stories. This is one of the things an outline can help us with. You’ve seen my post about storyboarding, so you know my outlines aren’t very deep.

There is a certain amount of planning that goes into plants & payoffs. You don’t want them to feel forced. It may not fool someone who reads all the time, but that’s okay. You never want your characters to look at the reader and say, “Stop the action for a bit. You need to know there is a meat cleaver in the kitchen drawer. Trust me, it’s going to be important in a few chapters.”

It may seem basic, but there could be someone out there who doesn’t know what I’m talking about. This involves a situation where an author Plants something in the…