Hi, I'm finally back with another Write Better Right Now craft video. In December, I talked about goal, motivation, and conflict. Quick review:
The goal is what your main character wants or needs to do, to get, to achieve in the story.
Your motivation is: Why is it important to them that they do this?
And the conflict is: Why is it difficult?
Today, I'm going to dig into motivation more—Why is it important?
You should know what your main character wants and why it's important to them, but you might want to spend a little more time thinking about the stakes. Stakes are what they gain if they succeed or what they risk if they fail.
Ideally, you want high stakes, and higher stakes means more drama. Now, it's going to depend on the kind of story you're writing. If you're writing a fantasy trilogy for adults, the stakes may literally be the survival or end of the universe. If you're writing an early reader for younger elementary kids, your stakes might be a lot lower, because it needs to be appropriate for the
audience and the length of the story and so forth. But within the parameters of what you're doing, higher stakes are generally better. They create more drama.
Stakes can be positive. That is a reward for success. Let's say we have a short story about a teen boy who is about to run a race, a big competition. Maybe the positive reward is the blue medal. Maybe it's a prize. Maybe he gets money if he wins.
The negative could be the humiliation of a rival winning instead. Negative stakes would be a punishment or loss for failure.
You could have both. You could have financial reward that he's hoping to win this prize money and also the humiliation if he loses.
The important thing is that there is a penalty for failure. Your character should not be able to walk away and have everything the same, or he could just try again, nothing changes. You want there to be a reason why they really have to succeed for their happiness.
And then you might think about, Can you raise the stakes?
So our teen boy who's getting ready for this big race, there's a financial prize. Why does he want that money? Maybe he is in love with this girl and he wants to ask her to prom, but he needs the money in order to buy the tickets and rent the tux and so forth. It’s very important to him. If you set it up that he really wants this, and he thinks this is his one last chance to get this girl, then if we like the character, we will probably want him to succeed. That will be high stakes there for the reward.
You could also increase the negative stakes. Maybe he gets goaded into betting with his rival for what will happen if one of them wins and one of them loses. If he loses, he's going to have to do something humiliating, which will further lower his chances of getting anybody to go to the prom with him.
So always think about whether you could raise the stakes in terms of what is appropriate for your story. Sometimes as writers, we tend to want to be a little too nice to our characters, not put them at huge risk. But in stories generally, higher risk is better.
Next, the stakes should be personal. My brother is a scriptwriter. He wrote the original screenplay for Sweet Home Alabama. He and I write the Felony Melanie series together about those characters as teenagers, and he's written several other novels. Plus, he has been teaching scriptwriting at a couple of colleges in L.A. for a number of years.
He has seen a lot of student screenplays, so he sees the mistakes that beginners tend to make there. He's commented that when students want to raise the stakes, they often think in terms of bigger. If they're writing a thriller and their action hero is trying to get to a bomb before it goes off, they might try to raise the stakes by having the bomb be in a place with more people, like a big sports stadium.
That doesn't actually raise the stakes as effectively as making it more personal. So if a loved one is where that bomb is going to go off, that is a way of raising the stakes. That's why in a lot of the disaster movies with earthquakes or volcanoes or whatever, you follow several individuals as they try to reach their loved ones across town or find out what's happening to them or save them.
In the movie Die Hard, Bruce Willis' character is a police officer. If he found out that these terrorists had taken over a building, he would probably try to help rescue those people. But if it were just a bunch of strangers, he might make different decisions. He might try to leave the building and go seek help. He might wait for backup. What raises the stakes is the fact that his wife is one of the hostages. He is not going to leave her. He's going to do everything he can to take care of the situation as quickly as possible.
Think in terms of personal stakes when you're trying to raise the stakes.
Exercise:
• What is your main character’s motivation for their goal?
• Is it clear early and often?
• What are your stakes? Positive, negative, both?
• Are the stakes personal?
• Could the stakes be higher?
Some exercises that you can do with your work in progress or even for an idea you have
for the future as you're still developing the idea.
You have established a main character with a goal. What is their motivation? Why is it very important for them to reach that goal?
Do you make that motivation clear early and often? Don't assume that readers are going to read between the lines and understand why your character wants this thing so much. As early as you can in the story, establish why it's so important to them. Then don't be afraid to remind the reader. Have the character think about why it's important to them throughout the story to
remind the reader of how important it is and to let them know that it's still important. Otherwise,
if you don't put that on the page, the reader may get the feeling that your character doesn't care as much anymore, and the tension lowers.
You can think about whether your stakes are positive, a reward for success, or negative,
a penalty for failure, or both. If it's only one or the other, is there a way that you can include both?
Make sure that the stakes are personal.
And then finally, can the stakes be higher? You might try to brainstorm five or 10 ways that you could raise the stakes and see if you come up with anything interesting there that you can use.
That's it for today's Write Better Right Now video. Next week, I will be back looking at want and need. I said at the beginning of this video that the goal is what a character wants or needs, but those can be actually very different things. So we will discuss what want and need really mean and when they might be different.
Thanks for joining me today.
Chris
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