I found this article floating around the net and found it valuable. I’m not sure where it started out, but I do give attribution, so what the hay. If you find the information valuable, please check out the author’s website and find out what other goodies she might have over there.
Ten Tips For Raising the Stakes in Your Fiction
Dr. Maxine Thompson
http://www.maxinethompson.com
http://www.maxineshow.com
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When I work with new writers as a literary coach or a story editor, I find that their stories often lack tension. In real life, we don’t care fo rtension, but in fiction, it is necessary to keep the reader turning pages. As the first reader, if the story doesn’t hold my interest, how will it hold the general public’s interest? New fiction writers’ stories tend to ramble on for page after page with little action taking place. So I often ask myself, how can the writer raise the stakes for this character? These are just some of the ideas I came up with as a way to raise the stakes and give your characters seemingly insurmountable obstacles.
Give your character’s quirks, if you want to raise the stakes in your
fiction. Have your character be the outsider, at odds with his environment and a threat, where people isolate or attack him, such as in Toni Morrison’s Beloved. After escaping from slavery, in an act of desperation, Sethe slashed her baby’s throat, rather than see the child go back to bondage. Although later, she was released from jail, the community threw up an implacable wall of scorn and disgust towards Sethe and her surviving children. In the end, though, Sethe realizes her need for community.
Janie, the protagonist, in Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God, is also an outsider. She is ostracized because she married a younger man. Often, I feel like an outsider and it struck me. Most writing is penned by artists who feel like outsiders. Women of other races have felt same sense of being different, judging from the misfits in Carson McCullers’ novel, The Heart is a Lonely Hunter.
As an African American woman, I can identify with feeling like an outsider. I know how it feels to be on the fringes of society. I know the double whammy scourge of both racism and sexism.
Here are ten more tips for raising the stakes in your fiction. This will produce both suspense and tension, which will compel your reader to stay up all night reading your book.
1. Put your character on the edge. The best fiction, films, and plays do this. (Cat on a Hot Tin Roof, Who’s Afraid of the Virginia Woolf?, Set It Off.)
2. Set a timetable. The characters only have one week or one day to save their kidnapped child’s life in exchange for a million dollar ransom.
3. Put danger of loss of some kind in the character’s life. Example: One student opened her novel with a child twirling in the mirror. I said change the point of view and let the mother wake up and not find her child in bed. That definitely would raise the stakes.
4. Life is hard. Show it, but in the end, be kind to your characters.
5. Love all your characters, the good, the bad, the ugly. This shows in the respect you give a character.
6. Turn the juice up on your characters, like in the movie, Forrest Gump, (starring Tom Hanks.) I loved the scene where Forrest’s friend, Lt. Dan (played by actor Gary Sinese), Vietnam vet/amputee, climbed up high on their boat’s sail mast, lightning and thunder swirling about him. He cursed God for how he had lost his legs in Vietnam, and to paraphrase, he asked God, “Is that all you got? Give me more.” (Sinese’s sensitive portrayal of a once invincible soldier reduced to a pathetic self-pitying specter of his former strength brought him the Oscar nomination for Best Supporting Actor.)
Likewise, go for the jugular vein in your characters. Let it rip. Now here is the paradox. Be kind in the end, yet at the same time, you should not resolve the character’s problems for them. Allow the characters to solve their own problems. It is all right if your story has an unhappy ending. But don’t be too kind to the characters along the way, when it comes to piling on the complications and problems. That means you’ve identified too closely with them.
7. If your character has cancer, double this whammy up by having her husband leave her, after she has her breast removed.
8. Sandbag the main character when he’s down, and paint him up into a corner, where there doesn’t appear to be any way out.
9. Use secrets to up the ante. A ghost, by definition, is something which haunts. When people have family secrets they are like ghosts. Writers can’t mine family secrets enough for story ideas, and I do this in both of my novels, The Ebony Tree and No Pockets in a Shroud. A family can be very clannish and protective of its secrets. But you know what? Every family has secrets. Every family is somewhat dysfunctional. Another secret could be that your character hit, possibly killed a person or a child, in a hit-and-run car accident and never reported it. This will haunt the person’s conscience.
10. Have your character have to choose between two negative outcomes. Critical choice is important in a work of fiction. (Should you pull the plug on a child in a coma, or let the child live on indefinitely with no quality of life?)
Dr. Maxine E. Thompson is the owner of Black Butterfly Press, Maxine Thompson’s Literary Services, Thompson Literary Agency and www.maxineshow.com. She hosts Internet radio shows on www.artisfirst.com and on www.maxineshow.com. She hosted on Voiceamerica.com from 3/02 to 12/06 and is currently taking a break. She is the author of eight titles, The EbonyTree, No Pockets in a Shroud, A Place Called Home, The Hush Hush Secrets of Writing Fiction That Sells, How to Publish, Market and Promote your Book Via Ebook Publishing, The Hush Hush Secrets of How To Create a Life You Love, Anthology, SECRET LOVERS, (with novella, Second Chances,) and Summer of Salvation. SECRET LOVERS made the Black Expression’s Book Club Bestselling list on 7-8-06 (after a 6-6-06 release date.)A new anthology, All in the Family, (Summer of Salvation) is due out in April 2007l Another new anthology, Never Knew Love Like This Before,(her novella, Katrina Blues,) is due out in June 2007.
