Hello, loyal blog readers! Sorry for the lack of posts lately, as I've been busy editing my novel for the 1,000th time, this time working to incorporate higher stakes and tension into the story. As I mentioned in a previous post, I attended a children's book writing seminar in the fall and really appreciated their take on the importance of stakes within a story.
In defining the implications of stakes, one speaker put it like this: if your character doesn't achieve their goal, they will either suffer a personal defeat (i.e., Sebastian doesn't end up with Mia in La La Land and his heart is broken) or a larger, more global defeat that affects others (i.e. the Avengers fail to stop Thanos in Avengers: Infinity War and millions of people disappear). And ideally, there is a race against time, like Rose and Jack trying to escape the Titanic before it sinks.
So as I think back to what has been missing from my novel, stakes and tension rise to the top. My main character has two main goals: 1) get the girl (I personally think the stakes are high enough there already) and 2) get his book onto The New York Times Best Sellers List in order to fulfill his deceased dad's lifelong dream.
There was no real urgency or race against time with the second goal and I didn't feel the "why" behind the stakes were strong enough, so I took a pass at raising the stakes over the past few weeks. Below are a few paragraphs from Chapter 1 that give a good overview of what I came up with. I'd love to hear your thoughts!
From The Frequent Missteps of J.D. Buckles:
“I’m a...I’m a...uh writer,” I stuttered, appalled by my date’s behavior.
“So are you in public relations or something or do you work for like a magazine?”
“Well, I’m kind of writing a book,” I said, as I thought of the thirty rejection emails I had received from agents and editors over the past few months for a book that my deceased dad was actually supposed to write. He swore over and over again in his last month that the story idea that he had recently plotted out would allow him to finally accomplish his lifelong dream of getting published. After his sudden passing from a massive heart attack five years ago, I had made a promise to him during his funeral that I would take on his dream as my own and find a way to see the Buckles name in print.
Now when I made that promise to my dad, it included a timestamp: I would get a publishing deal by what would have been his 50th birthday. This was an age milestone that had greatly distressed my father, as his own dad, an aspiring author himself, had died of a stroke at 50 without a single publishing deal. As my dad crept into his mid-forties, he regularly declared that he would, “NOT let another Buckles man enter into his 50’s as an unpublished writer!”
While he avoided that fate through death, I was not willing to let this multi-generational writing slump continue, and swore to my father and grandfather that I would achieve publishing glory by the date over which my dad had obsessed: Christmas Day 2010...which was now just 16 days away. As a novice novelist with zero original ideas, I decided to write my novel using the basic story outline my dad had raved about in order to accomplish this goal. But given the fact that I had yet to receive anything more than form rejections from agents and editors, I realized that perhaps, just like the other Buckles men before me, I was destined for failure.