Raising the Stakes in Fiction
with Deesha Philyaw
What's at stake for your characters? If the stakes are low or unclear, readers are going to wonder, “So what?” And if we want readers to keep reading, we’d better have an answer to that question. So we raise the stakes for our characters. What do they have to lose? What are they trying to gain? What's standing in the way between them and what they want? In this workshop, we’re going to talk about and practice different ways to raise the stakes in fiction. You'll work with characters from your story-in-progress, or start fresh on a new story.