Advanced Brilliant Writing: Make Your Plots Wider and Your Characters Deeper (Go! Write Something Brilliant) (14 page)

Book Therapist question:

• Where does your hero begin his journey?
  
• What is the Noble Sacrifice he makes at the end?
  

Why should a reader pick up your book? Why should they care about your story?

Stakes.

The Stakes are the key to any winning story—the higher the stakes, the more epic a story. Another way to look at it is . . . what will happen if the hero fails his quest? Mordor will take over Middle Earth. The Empire will prevail. The aliens will take over the planet.

But not all stories can have world destruction at the core of their plot. Maybe the story is simply about finding or losing your true love.
The Princess Bride. Sleepless in Seattle. While You Were Sleeping.

The key isn’t how big the stakes are, but how deeply they hit home with the reader. The more personal the stakes, the more they resonate at our core, the more we will not only believe them, but embrace them. Stakes can be used as motivation to drive a reader through the story, and turned into obstacles to give your reader and your character “something to fight for.”

Stakes can be public (affecting society, like in
Raiders of the Lost Ark, The Hunt for Red October
, or even
Erin Brockovich
), or private (as in some of my favorites:
Frequency, Cellular
, or even the poignant
Somersby
). The important element is: If the stakes matter to you, they’ll matter to your readers.

Public Stakes

Public stakes have much to do with public values. For example, during World War Two (WWII), the public value was very much protecting our country and banding together to fight the war. So, stories about espionage and battle were popular stakes in books and movies.

However, as time has changed, so have our values.

Today, personal freedom and family have taken over as the chief collective stakes of today. We still have issues of national security (which is why shows like
24
are so popular). But even within those issues, it is shows like
Army Wives
, which focus on the personal life behind the war, that captures people. When stakes involve our freedoms and safety as Americans, or members of a family, it makes for a compelling story.

One example is
Saving Private Ryan
. Even the main character—Capt. John Miller—realizes the power of family within the great backdrop of the war as he fights to bring home Private Ryan to his devastated mother.

A story stake that had, for example, saving the shoppers in a mall from a terrorist’s bomb, or keeping a disease from becoming an epidemic and sweeping across the nation would be a current public stake.

Ask
: What matters to me? If it matters to you, then it matters to others. What’s the worst thing you could think of happening to you? Others will fear that also. And that’s where you find your Public Stakes.

But what if your story is more personal? What if it only affects a family—perhaps it’s the story of a child that is kidnapped, or one of my favorite episodes of
Little House on the Prairie:
Laura and the horse race.

Who can forget the story of Laura Ingalls, where she rides her horse Bunny in a race against Nellie? Evil Nellie hates that Laura has a horse, and persuades her mother to buy her a fancy horse from Mankato. Laura’s horse doesn’t have a chance in the race against this thoroughbred. What’s worse, Mrs. Olsen mocks Caroline for being poor and refuses to sell her shoes for her children until she has cash. If Laura can win the race, she’ll receive a prize that she can use to pay for the shoes. She trains Bunny and is ready for the big race when Willie (Nellie’s brother) gets sick. No one is around, so Laura has to make a choice: Ride Bunny to fetch the doctor and risk the horse being too tired to run the race, or let Willie suffer. What will she do?

We care about the outcome of this story because it has tapped into our values of family honor and compassion.

These are
Private Stakes.

Private stakes can be found in the root of our values. The things that drive us, or the things we long for. Laura longed to show up Nellie, and to help her parents. But she also knew that to be true to who she was, she had to be compassionate. When we tap into our private stakes, it touches the core of our characters, and our readers, and gives them as reason to fight. You know I was sitting on the edge of the sofa, (or more likely standing up, cheering) as Laura ran the race with Bunny.

How do you find those personal values of your character? Here are some simple Book Therapist questions.

• What matters most to him in life?
  
• What would he avoid at all costs, and why?
  
• What are his goals, and why?
  

As you interview your character and plot your story, see if you can discover the Stakes of the story.

You will use both Public Stakes and Private Stakes as fodder to create obstacles and motivations for your character as you plot your storyline.

Discovering the Public and Private Stakes are only the first step in creating a compelling story. They must then be used to create Story Stakes and Motivation and then put to the right rhythm and balance into the plot to create a riveting sequence of events. A great story requires a careful balance of rising Story Stakes and strengthening Motivations not unlike the rhythm of the one–two punch. They work together to create a can’t-put-it-down novel.

But how do you pick the right Story Stakes, use them for maximum effect to create a knockout bestseller?

Let the Fight Begin!

One of my favorite movies for continually raising stakes and forcing the viewer to the edge of her seat is the thriller,
Cellular
. Just to recap, in a nutshell, it’s a movie about a woman who is kidnapped. She uses a demolished phone to call for help and gets hold of a young man whose girlfriend has broken up with him because of his irresponsibility. A deadline of sorts hangs over their conversation (an essential element in any suspense), because, at any moment, they could get cut off, and she may never be able to dial out again. She must convince this random guy to help her. He eventually gets involved to the point where he begins to break the law and risk his life to save her.

Why does he do all this for someone he doesn’t know? It’s certainly not to prove he’s responsible. He actually doesn’t agree with the accusation by his girlfriend. So what makes this free-living guy care enough about a stranger to help her?

The answer is found in the rising balance of Story Stakes and Motivation.

We learned about the different kind of kind of stakes: public and private. Now as you lay out the stakes, you’re going to make them fit your story.

First, you’ll make sure they are in
Proportion
to the challenges before the hero. If the stakes are too great, the hero will simply give up.

For example, by the end of
Cellular
, the hero is taking on bad cops in the LA police department who are trying to kill him. If he knew at the beginning of the movie what he’d be facing in the end, he would have hung up the phone in an instant. But in the beginning of
Cellular
, only the life of the woman is at risk—and frankly our hero doesn’t even believe her. All that is at stake for him is that he’ll be late running an errand for a friend. (Thus cementing the idea he’s irresponsible.) The stakes are miniscule, and he doesn’t need much private motivation to overcome them.

He takes his cell phone to the police station rather dubiously, and is told he has to take the phone to the next floor. He’s losing reception on the phone when he hears her being attacked. Suddenly, the stakes are raised. The woman’s life
really
could
be
in danger. Suddenly we’re beginning to tap into his values (responsibility). He isn’t going to let the phone go dead.

Now what? The author raises the stakes to a new level. The woman’s son is threatened. The hero makes a heroic choice (one step above his primal instincts) when he decides he must race to the school to find the boy . . . only to have school let out a sea of khaki and blue-shirt clad ten- year-old boys. He is too late to reach the child, and watches him get kidnapped.

New Stake: The child has been kidnapped by thugs. It is met with the new Motivation: A child’s life is in danger, and the hero didn’t reach him in time, thus he feels responsible. Our hero makes yet another heroic choice when he races after the bad guys, all the while dodging traffic.

Then the cell phone battery begins to die. It’s yet another stake in the story, compounded by the fact that he’s lost the bad guys. In that moment, our hero makes a pivotal choice to hold up a cell phone store for a battery charger, crossing the line to a point of no return.

Why?

Because the stakes have been raised. His belief that now two lives are at stake, and that only he can help (Why!), trumps the challenges before him. If he’d, say, grabbed the plate number, and called it into the police, or believed that the victim might call someone else for help, he might not have had sufficient motivation or belief in the stakes to confront the challenges before him.

Now that the motivation—that only he can help—have been raised to meet the stakes—the two lives on the line—the author raises the stakes yet again, threatening the husband. And after our hero has conquered the challenge of saving the husband . . . the author raises them again with a final stake—good against evil.

The key element here is the harder a character has to fight to win the day, and the more he has to fight for, the stronger the reader will stay hooked to the story. But each rising stake in the story must be in proportion to the motivation the character has to overcome it.

The second element to weaving stakes into your story is to create
Believability.
If, say, our hero was suddenly being chased down the street by a tank, in the middle of LA, well, we might react the same we did to crazy movies like
Volcano
. But even in
Independence Day
, we believed each outrageous stake because they’d gradually brought in the aliens and destroyed the cities in a way that seemed plausible.

Every increasing stake in
Cellular
is believable, or explained easily away, from losing reception (he is in an old building with cement walls), to why he can’t rescue the child (the kids are all in uniform, and the school lets out just as he arrives, into a flood of blue-shirted tykes). As you create your stakes, make sure there is one simple, believable explanation for that rising stake.

The final key in keeping your plot riveting is
Balance.
The stakes must rise in rhythm to the motivations. If you raise two or three stakes at once, then you need to ensure the motivations are strong enough to overcome it.

For example, in
Cellular,
if our hero’s cell phone battery was dying, someone was shooting at him, and he got into a car accident and broke his arm all at once without stopping to insert rising motivations, he might throw in the towel. His motivation just wouldn’t be great enough to face those cascading stakes. However, if the bad guys got a glimpse of him, and promised to go after someone he loved, he might find the strength to dig himself out of the rubble.

Make sure that you’re balancing those stakes with motivations in a rhythm that keeps your hero moving forward instead of crushing him. And remember—the higher the stakes and the faster they pile up, the more tense the story. So, it behooves the author to save those techniques until the end of your story.

You’ll notice too, that each time a stake is raised, another element of his Primal Instincts is brought into play.

Proportion, Believability
and
Balance
are the keys to propelling your character through a story, over obstacles and challenges and even to the point of your hero risking it all for a stranger and becoming an ultimate hero.

Book Therapist Question:

• For every challenge or turn in the story, have your raised the stakes sufficiently?
  
• Are the characters current Motivations high enough to face those stakes?
  

Make Your Plot Wider:

I have a rule of thumb: Every fifty pages, I raise the stakes. That’s about every 10,000-12,000 words. Or every three or four chapters. Don’t forget to make your hero more heroic with each decision!

Peripheral Plotting

What if the book feels too linear, despite the rising stakes and motivations? Or perhaps it feels only about power or survival? How do you make your character pick through his Primal Instincts to find the nobler one?

You need to employ some
Peripheral Plotting!

Peripheral Plotting is the technique of pulling in ancillary elements and using them to create more tension in your plot. Ideally, they will make your character have to tap into a more noble instinct and push them along their journey.

How does Peripheral Plotting work?