{"id":936,"date":"2011-05-02T10:57:45","date_gmt":"2011-05-02T14:57:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.old.caraghobrien.com\/book\/?p=936"},"modified":"2011-05-02T11:03:06","modified_gmt":"2011-05-02T15:03:06","slug":"raising-the-stakes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/writing\/raising-the-stakes\/","title":{"rendered":"Raising the Stakes"},"content":{"rendered":"

Suppose your character is running late. If she\u2019s late to class, or late to her sister\u2019s wedding, or late to see her mother on her deathbed, the stakes are different.\u00a0 Suppose she needs to exit a room.\u00a0 It makes a difference if she can simply walk out, or the door is locked, or the room is on fire.\u00a0 Next suppose she needs to get out of a burning, locked room in time to save her mother from dying.\u00a0 We\u2019ve just raised the stakes.<\/p>\n

\"\"

Locked in.<\/p><\/div>\n

In the poker analogy, there\u2019s more money in the bet, more at risk, more to lose when a player raises the stakes.\u00a0 The game matters more, so the gambler or the reader cares more, too.\u00a0 In the best stories, we\u2019re playing for keeps.<\/p>\n

Of course, we can\u2019t have houses on fire all the way through our novels, and too many fires or chase scenes can make a book feel contrived.\u00a0 The escalation of trouble needs to be grounded in reality, but inevitable, like the on-going train wreck in Of Mice and Men<\/em>, which seems like a simple story about friends while underneath (spoilers ahead) the violence keeps building: dead mouse, euthanized pet dog, mutilated hand, murdered puppy, murdered woman, murdered friend.<\/p>\n

It\u2019s easy to see it in retrospect, as a reader, but how do you raise the stakes as a writer?<\/p>\n

It\u2019s not a simple matter, even when we already grasp that conflict is the key.\u00a0 A mistake that\u2019s easy to make is creating characters who get very worked up over something small, a thing with no other emotional weight around it.\u00a0 A man and a woman arguing about tearing down or preserving an old windmill, for instance, might seem promising because of the culture and history involved, but already I\u2019m thinking, who cares?\u00a0 I\u2019m already expecting the characters will seem sort of silly or quaint or unreasonably stubborn when they get all worked up (which, incidentally, can work quite well in comedy).\u00a0 If a writer is told at this point, \u201craise the stakes,\u201d someone can bring in a bulldozer, but it still won\u2019t have much power to engage me.<\/p>\n

On the other hand, if a man and a woman are arguing instead about the custody of their son, I\u2019m already anxious.\u00a0 It matters.\u00a0 If the father agrees to pierce his son\u2019s ear when the mother has told the boy no piercings are allowed, that\u2019s a conflict with emotional promise.\u00a0 The thing\u2014the ear lobe\u2014is small, but the relationships around it are deep.\u00a0 If now it turns out the old windmill is the home of the boy\u2019s mother, who is a deaf artist and makes her living selling her paintings there, now I care about the windmill, too.\u00a0 Try a bulldozer now, on top of the pierced ear, and the stakes\u2014the risk for loss and vindictive pain\u2014are much higher.<\/p>\n

If we start with a conflict that has sincere emotional consequences and turn the characters loose, it\u2019s likely the stakes will rise automatically and naturally.\u00a0 You can think about it in simple terms of escalation, (Who has eaten my porridge?\u00a0 Who has broken my chair?\u00a0 Who is sleeping in my bed!) but it\u2019s the betrayal or loss or outrage that will give the story resonance.\u00a0 For that, someone has to be at risk, in different emotional ways, in scene after scene.\u00a0 The potential for hurt can be subtle, as when a character is misunderstood or isolated, but it needs to be there.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re a seat-of-the-pantser like I am, and you aren\u2019t working with an outline of the story arc all planned, it helps to feel in each scene, while writing it, that things are purely getting worse.\u00a0 Surprise: the patient father gets violent when his authority is thwarted.\u00a0 Surprise: the boy who seems ready to skip school won\u2019t go with his friend.\u00a0 Raising the stakes is not just a plot device; it allows the characters to become more complex and interesting. \u00a0We see what they’re like under pressure, and we learn even more when we make our characters exert pressure on each other.<\/p>\n

If you\u2019re trouble-shooting a scene and you think you need to raise the stakes, make sure first that your characters are in a problem that really matters.\u00a0 Delete any paragraph that\u2019s just sitting there not advancing the action.\u00a0 Make a character do and say things that will make the situation worse, especially if she means well.\u00a0 Lock the door so she has to sneak out a window.\u00a0 Add rain so she\u2019s miserably wet and cold.\u00a0 When she thinks she can\u2019t be a midwife anymore, confront her with a woman in labor.\u00a0 Give her scars that matter.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Suppose your character is running late. If she\u2019s late to class, or late to her sister\u2019s wedding, or late to see her mother on her deathbed, the stakes are different.\u00a0 Suppose she needs to exit a room.\u00a0 It makes a difference if she can simply walk out, or the door is locked, or the room […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[37],"class_list":["post-936","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-writing","tag-writing-2"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=936"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":939,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/936\/revisions\/939"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=936"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=936"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.caraghobrien.com\/book\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=936"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}