Personal Stakes

Gambling was a part of life in the Regency Era. Card games abounded: faro, whist, hazard. Fortunes were won and lost on a nightly basis in the clubs, gaming hells, and card rooms of London. But I don’t want to talk about those kinds of stakes today.

Moving forward again in Writing the Breakout Novel Workbook by Donald Maass to chapter 7: Defining Personal Stakes.

This is digging in even deeper on the WHYs instead of just the WHATs that your protagonists are doing. Why does it matter in some profound and personal way? How does the plot shape, mold, twist, and otherwise reveal your protagonist and what do they stand to gain if they succeed in their goals or lose if they fail or just walk away?

In many ways, this is another digging down deep exercise. The question here isn’t WHY so much as “What would make their goal, need, desire, conflict, yearning matter even more?” Also, we’re supposed to be looking for inner motives more than outer motives here.

Maass asks us to exhaust our imaginations not once, not twice, but three times in coming up with ways to increase these personal stakes. He notes that when he teaches this in a workshop setting, the participants say the resulting lists look like plot complications. You want the character to be driven forward using as many of the possibilities you come up with. The more rocks you throw at your protagonist while (s)he’s up in that tree, the more interesting their journey should be.

I suspect this exercise is going to take some thinking and percolation since for the book I’m working on this area also seems to be rather weak or at least one sided. My heroine has some personal stakes she’s up against, but the hero remains a little lump of latent clay. And looking at some of the books I’ve really enjoyed lately, this is a make or break part of a book for me.