Our stories thrive on stakes. What the hero might lose. How new knowledge can save them. We give characters skills and powers that will affect the story, and when the stakes are high enough, those can be amazing powers.
We make those stakes high enough by making them personal. Donald Maass says there are two kinds of stakes, the public and the personal. Public stakes might have emotional power. When the stakes are personal, they always deliver emotional zing.
As an example, a public stake might be the loss of justice for women in workplaces. Conflict is being waged between an employer and a union or a government, for example. We care, because many people will be impacted.
We care on an emotional level when the story makes its stakes impact a leading character. My home will be taken away, because my pay is unequal to a man’s: that’s measurable loss. Add in a family who will suffer, and your public stakes transform to personal power.
Stakes give us the worst case, plainly, then show the action that rescues a person. One essential element of stakes is yearning. That yearning was crucial in novelist Robert Olen Butler’s lesson at a conference of literary teachers.
In 2006 as I started the Workshop, the Association of Writing Programs brought its annual AWP conference to Austin. Butler won the Pulitzer Prize for his story collection A Good Scent from a Strange Mountain. The stories were about the lives of Vietnamese immigrants living in Louisiana. At AWP he urged us to follow the yearning in our stories.
“You can’t exist for even thirty seconds without desiring something,” he said at talks in this era. “My favorite word is yearning because it suggests the deepest level of desire. This notion of yearning has its reflection in one of the most fundamental craft points in fiction: plot. Because plot is simply yearning being challenged and thwarted.”
When we see in your story what can lift your character into a better life, or we can see what they must escape or they will be ruined, we know their yearning. You can use yearning as the one true north to find meaningful stakes. War is terrible, but casualties and injury are the personal stakes.
Maass teases us with the promise of what emotional storytelling can do. A gripping story usually shows us transformation, not just satisfaction of needs. “To be happy is a primary human need. To transcend oneself, though, is a devine attainment. The former is enough to make a story good. The latter is what makes a story great.”
When your characters are driven by personal stakes, it’s easier to give them a chance to transcend themselves. It might sound like this: She took her chances against the crooked police because she couldn’t live with herself otherwise. Protecting the future of the family meant she’d have to become braver and dance among danger.
