WRITING : RAISING THE STAKES

This is something I've written for the book about Radio Drama Claire Grove and I are working on - which is a note to myself as well as to other readers of the book.

Raising the stakes

This is a difficult area to discuss but it’s surprising how often we don’t exploit our ideas as fully or as boldly as we should. We worry about being “obvious” or “melodramatic” and leave everything as a much lower emotional level than we should.

When we first start exploring our characters and themes through writing about them, we often make interesting discoveries, sometimes half way through a scene, but we don’t necessarily build on them.

If you want your audience to care about your characters, then you have to make them feel there’s something important at stake. If a character gets told off mildly by his or her boss for being late to work, then it’s probably not that compelling a scene. But what if the job is at stake and the boss issues a final warning? Or if the two characters had been having a secret affair and this mild spat uncovers that?

If a character is being teased because they appeared on a television documentary and made a bit of fool of themselves then we ought to ask – should they have made a complete fool of themselves? What’s the biggest impact this humiliation could have on their life, their family, their relationships?

Sometimes we feel it’s not “likely” that a character with an important piece of information should knock and enter just when that piece of information is needed. But that’s often what strong and compelling story-telling needs. The characters bump into the very person they don’t want to meet. The meal he cooks for her isn’t just mildly disappointing, it’s a culinary disaster. If the dog goes missing, don’t necessarily let it be found again too soon, there may be more mileage in the extended anxiety of its owners. If the characters take a boat trip, they might get mildly seasick or they might get caught in a howling gale? Which is going to have more impact?

I’m inviting you to think boldly about what you’ve created in your first draft and to seize the opportunities to make your play bigger, bolder, funnier, more exciting. It really is true that we get frightened and think – no, I can’t do that, it’s too much, it’s not likely. Give it a try. Raise the stakes.