RAISING THE STAKES

In most every writing manual, writers are admonished to "raise the stakes" if they want their readers riveted tot he words on the page. This is communicated nowhere as well as in Donald Maas' excellent Writing the Breakout Novel. In fact, Mr. Maas goes a step further and talks about the difference between "public" stakes and "personal" stakes as a way to deepen and intensify the plot. Public stakes refers what the character stands to lose externally if things don't go the way he or she wants, while personal stakes refers to what a character stands to lose internally. In short, want to captivate your reader? Make it clear that something--something BIG, in fact (or even better MANY BIG), things are at stake. Put something at risk.

Just the other day, I put this very concept to work in School Spirit. I had been reading a murder mystery called Darkness, Take My Hand by the very talented Dennis Lehane. In the climax, the detective faces down the killer, an old friend and neighborhood local as it turns out, who had been killing people for decades. Certainly, on the surface, fairly typical fair for the climax of a mystery novel. But then the killer opens the trunk of his car and removes two hostages, a mother and her small baby who is in a pouch that the killer puts around himself, right next to the 12-gauge shotgun. Lehane has just raised the stakes. Endangering the woman would have raised the stakes plenty, but to then put a BABY in danger puts the reader on the edge of his seat and compelled to find out what will happen to the poor infant. At least it did for me.

During my next writing session, the main character is cornered by the bullies in the story and pushed around a little bit. He's not completely beat up (I'm writing THAT scene tomorrow!), but they try to scare him. Having finished Lehane's novel, and realizing how he raised the stakes in his climax, I was wondering how I could raise the stakes in the scene I was currently writing. So, learning from Lehane--and also remembering what a good writing friend told me during the revision of my last book that I should put more family in the story because people have families and that needs to be reflected--I made it so that the main character was picking up his brother at guitar lessons and the bullies hassle the little brother as well. I raised the stakes by having the main character worried that the bullies might hurt his brother, too.

After writing the scene, I realized, quite simply, that Maas (as well as all those other books) were right.

Get Maas' book. It's like an fiction writing MFA between two covers.