Anna Staniszewski

I have one WIP I’ve been working on for a few years. It’s a complicated story and I keep struggling to figure out how to tell it. It’s gone through so many versions at this point that it’s hard for me to figure out what it needs or what it’s lacking. But I keep coming back to it, trusting that the answer is in me somewhere.

As I took up yet another revision of this story recently, I also began reading Donald Maass’s Writing the Breakout Novel. I studied Maass’s book carefully, trying to apply its advice to my WIP. Finally, something clicked. It was in the discussion of high stakes:

Near the beginning of this chapter, I mentioned a devastating question that can be posed about any novel: So what? If you have an answer for that question, you have established your novel’s stakes. Now, here’s a second, and tougher, question: If your stakes are X or Y or Z…why should I care?

As I applied these two questions to my WIP, I realized that while I had answers, they could have been stronger. In other words, the stakes in my story still weren’t high enough. I also realized that the public stakes for my fictional community were higher than the personal stakes for my main character. Obviously the character cares about the public stakes because she’s part of the community, but what she personally had to gain or lose wasn’t concrete enough.

I realized that this was related to another problem I’d been having, of making the main character relatable. Luckily, Maass has some advice on this too:

One cares because the protagonist cares. In other words, to the degree that your main character feels passionately invested in his own life, the reader will feel invested, too.

Ultimately I had to make the circumstances of my novel of greater personal importance to the main character. It wasn’t enough that her society would change if she failed or succeeded in her task; there had to be a deeper personal reason driving her. Armed with that information, I began to rework my book (yet again), and already I feel like it’s flowing much more smoothly.

We hear the term “raise the stakes” constantly in writing, but I think it’s easy to forget that there are different kinds of stakes in each story. Every character, major or minor, has his/her own stakes. And every conflict in a novel should have deeper implications, so that it affects more than just one person. Raising the stakes means making sure that the main character needs to act, needs to find a solution, otherwise  s/he will never be happy again.