5 Tips for Revealing the Stakes in Your Story
Many writers strive to suggest a story’s coming complications—its “stakes,” so to speak—in the first paragraph or two. These details reveal something that will intrude on a character’s happiness or prevent them from getting what they need.
(The 3 Key Types of Stakes That Drive Novels.)
Consider the first paragraph of John Cheever’s “Goodbye, My Brother,” and the protagonist’s musings on his family. The Pommeroys, he tells us, are “very close in spirit.” There’s a “permanence” about them. Any “rupture” in their loyalty to one another is “a source of confusion and pain.”
Reading these words, one can’t help but think, “Uh-oh…what’s coming for the Pommeroys?”
In my collection The Continental Divide, I try to establish a similar unease—early and unmistakable—in my stories. What follows are five tips that have worked for me, as demonstrated by the first paragraph of my piece “The Half Hour.”
Put your protagonist in an uncomfortable place.
Here’s the first half of my story’s first sentence: “Maizey Bates was twenty-three years old and lived with her mother on Crawford Street…”
Of course, there’s nothing inherently wrong or uncomfortable about being 23 years old and living with one’s mother. Such arrangements happen all the time. But is it what most 23-year-olds we know would choose?
And what about Crawford Street? When I was a boy the richest people in the county lived on Greenleaf Boulevard. Do those same kinds of people live on Crawford Street, or does that name suggest a thornier existence?
Up the ante.
Here’s the second half to the first sentence: “…while most of her friends had husbands and babies.”
Uh-oh, the narrator doesn’t openly declare that Maizey Bates is unhappy with things as they are, but the juxtaposition of her circumstances versus those of her friends is presented in stark, physical detail. She’s 23 and living with her mother, while her friends are married and making babies.
Trouble’s brewing, and this is only the first sentence of the story.
Did I mention stark, physical detail?
Now for the first half of the second sentence: “She was six feet tall and had a rash on her elbows that never went away…”
Again, the narrator doesn’t say that Maizey is “lonely” or “despairing.” Abstractions like these “put the mind to sleep,” Flannery O’Connor reminds us. Our job as writers is to inject meaning into our scenes by what people see, hear, and smell, and we do this best by putting rashes on our characters’ elbows.
Consider the opening paragraph of O’Connor’s “A Good Man Is Hard to Find.” Here we meet a woman “whose face was broad and innocent as a cabbage and was tied around a green head-kerchief that had two points on top like rabbit’s ears.” This person has barely a line of dialogue until the end of the story, when a murderer asks if she’d like to go into the woods with one of his henchmen. “Yes, thank you,” she replies.
My point? The woman’s cabbage face and rabbit ears paint her as a person so timid and broken in spirit that she would walk meekly to her death. O’Connor’s awful (and darkly comic) physical details make us believe it.
When you do use an abstraction, make it a lightning bolt.
Here’s the second half to the sentence above: “…and her prospects for love had thinned to a few bachelor farmers or the mortician’s son, a boy who wandered the sidewalks of Mount Moriah and talked to people his father had embalmed the week before.”
Maizey, we learn by my opening paragraph’s end, is living a life without “love,” and her only chances of finding it are a few “bachelor farmers” (make that old) and the mortician’s son, who is clearly several eggs short of a dozen.
Maizey wishes for a change in the love department, and I would argue that throwing that abstract word into the conversation just once gives her desire a solitary, thunderous power. In contrast, using it more than that would make it a dud…a damp firecracker instead of the cherry bomb I want it to be.
Take two weeks off and then quit altogether.
I’m clearly being tongue-in-cheek here. Let me explain:
Years ago I played golf regularly (and badly) with a WWII veteran named Jay. When I lamented to him about my game one hot afternoon, he grinned at me with a glorious set of fake choppers and said, “Here’s my advice. Take two weeks off and then quit altogether.”
Considering how poorly I was playing, Jay may have meant what he said literally, though I’d prefer to believe he was telling me to stop grinding so hard, to let my lessons and muscle memory take over, to get out of my own head.
I would offer the same advice to anyone embarking on a new story. If you’re mired in the mud over stakes or anything else, try shaking things up. Change your protagonist’s name from Harold to Lucille. Switch from the close-third to first-person POV. Do like screenwriter Dalton Trumbo did and write in the bathtub.
Most of all, be still and listen. The same voice that has urged you all this time to write is waiting to fill in the blanks for you…if only you get out of your own way.
I was never especially successful in following my friend’s advice on the golf course, but I’ve had a certain success applying it to fiction writing, and for that I tip my hat to old Jay.
Check out Bob Johnson’s The Continental Divide here:
(WD uses affiliate links)
