Lesson 6: Advanced Techniques
Once you've got your basic story idea down, it's time to make it more powerful by raising the stakes, pushing the characters, and using the setting to full advantage. In this lesson we'll discuss these techniques for elevating your story.
(For more information on taking your fiction to the next level, see Writing the Breakout Novel.)
Raising the Stakes
If your characters don't get what they want, what will happen? Something terrible? I hope so, because if not, why does it matter to your readers if your characters reach their goals? It has to matter a great deal to your characters and to your readers. Your characters should feel that life is not worth living if they don't reach their goals. Alternately, the world should be changed for the worse, or other characters should suffer, if your characters don't get what they want.
When you imagine what will happen to your characters if they don't get what they are struggling toward, it should be the worst thing you can imagine. Raise those stakes to the highest possible level. Ask yourself what exactly would be lost if your character didn't reach his goal. Is it a significant enough loss for the readers to care enough to keep turning pages?
In order for high stakes to matter, the character, himself, must also matter to the readers. We don't necessarily care about any old character running for his life. He must have already been made sufficiently sympathetic by the time his stakes are introduced.
