by Donald Maass
Personal Stakes
It is easy to dismiss the protagonist's personal stakes as just another way of saying what motivates him. But that is simplistic. Personal stakes are more than just what a hero wants to do. They illustrate why: Why this goal and the action that must be performed matters in a profound and personal sense. The more it matters to your hero, the more it will matter to yours readers, too.
Mystery writer Harlan Coben grew popular with his first couple of novels featuring sports agent/sleuth Myron Bolitar, but it wasn't until he made the leap to stand-alone novels with Tell No One that he broke out big time. His second stand-alone, Gone for Good, also reached The New York Times best-seller list, and it provides many lessons in the construction of breakout-level fiction.
Gone for Good tells the story of Will Klein, a New York City counselor of runaway children. Will is haunted by the rape and murder of his high school girlfriend, Julie Miller, in her suburban New Jersey home one year after their all-too-typical breakup during their freshman year of college.
A detective haunted by the unsolved murder of his wife or girlfriend is one of the biggest cliches in mystery fiction. However, Coben gives this familiar element an original twist: Julie, it is widely believed, was raped and murdered by Will's older brother Ken, who disappeared that night and has been a fugitive for eleven years. The case was a media sensation and continues to revive with every purported sighting of Ken. Will and his family continue to believe in Ken's innocence—and that he is dead, or "gone for good."
As the story opens, Will learns from his dying mother that Ken is still alive, news that stirs in Will happy memories of his brother, including Ken's reaction to Will's first makeout session with a girl at a space exploration-themed bar mitzvah:
When Cindi and I stealthily returned to Cape Kennedy's Table Apollo 14, ruffled and in fine post-smooch form (the Herbie Zane Band serenading the crowd with "Fly Me to the Moon"), my brother, Ken, pulled me to the side and demanded details. I, of course, too gladly gave them. He awarded me with a smile
and slapped me five. That night, as we lay on the bunk beds, Ken on the top, me on the bottom, the stereo playing Blue Oyster Cult's "Don't Fear the Reaper" (Ken's favorite), my older brother explained to me the facts of life as seen by a ninth-grader. I'd later learn he was mostly wrong (a little too much emphasis on the breast), but when I think back to that night, I always smile.
With this memory of brotherly bonding, Coben begins to build Will's stakes. He has a lot invested in his image of his brother. Subsequent events will sorely test Will's faith in Ken's innocence, yet Coben keeps Will's conviction level high by frequently reinforcing Will's feelings with positive memories. Will's faith in Ken cannot be shaken.
Meanwhile, Coben also introduces Will's current girlfriend, Sheila Rogers. Coben tips us off immediately that there is something warm and right about their relationship when, after the funeral of Will's mother, Will decides that he needs a breather:
I got to my feet. Sheila looked up at me with concern. "I'm going to take a walk," I said softly.
"You want company?"
"I don't think so."
Sheila nodded. We had been together nearly a year. I've never had a partner so in sync with my rather odd vibes. She gave my hand another I-love-you squeeze, and the warmth spread through me.
Coben reinforces these loving feelings several times before introducing the first dark note about Sheila: She was a teenage runaway at one time, but that is all that she will say about her past. This hint of doubt colors the next plot development: That night Sheila disappears, leaving only a note that says, "Love you always." Soon afterward, the FBI comes to Will's office looking for information on her whereabouts. Sheila's fingerprints have been found at the site of a double homicide in Albuquerque, New Mexico.
During the course of the novel it will take a lot for Will to maintain his belief in Sheila's innocence, too, but Coben deepens Will's convictions—in effect, raises his personal stakes—at a number of points. The first of these comes as Will holds Sheila's sweatshirt and recalls a homecoming weekend visit to his alma mater, Amherst:
Late one night Sheila and I walked the campus, hand in hand. We lay on the Hill's soft grass, stared at the pure fall sky, and talked for hours. I remember thinking that I had never known such a sense of peace, of calm and comfort and, yes, joy. Still on our backs, Sheila put her palm on my stomach and then, eyes on the stars, she slipped her hand under the waistband of my pants.
I turned just a little and watched her face. When her fingers hit, uh, pay dirt, I saw her wicked grin.
"That's giving it the old college try," she'd said.
And okay, maybe I was turned on as all get-out, but it was at that very moment, on that hill, her hand in my pants, when I first realized, really realized with an almost supernatural certainty, that she was the one, that we would always be together, that the shadow of my first love, my only love before Sheila, the one that haunted me and drove away the others, had finally been banished.
I looked at the sweatshirt for a moment, I could smell the honeysuckle and foliage all over again. I pressed it against me and wondered for the umpteenth time since I'd spoken to Pistillo: Was it all a lie?
No.
You don't fake that. Squares might be right about people's capacity to do violence. But you can't fake a connection like ours.
Nevertheless, ugly truths surface about Sheila Rogers. At one time she was a prostitute. Will and his co-worker Squares track down her one-time, and now bed-ridden, pimp, Louis Castman, who recognizes that Sheila means something special to Will:
"You," he said.
"What about me?"
"Sheila." He smiled. "She means something to you, am I right?"
I didn't reply.
"You love her."
He stretched out the word love. Mocking me. I kept still.
"Hey, I don't blame you, man. That was some quality tang. And, man, she could suck the—"
I started toward him. Castman laughed. Squares stepped in the way. He looked me straight in the eye and shook his head. I backed off. He was right.
Castman stopped laughing, but his eyes stayed on me. "You want to know how I turned your girl out, lover boy?"
Castman then recounts winning Sheila's trust on her arrival in New York at the Port Authority bus terminal, and how he subsequently kept her cuffed to a bed, shot her full of drugs, raped her, videotaped it, and kept her high until she was addicted and willing to do anything for a fix. This gruesome story would enrage a stone. Coben keeps Will's reaction muted, but it doesn't take much to see that Will, the runaway counselor, will now do anything to find and rescue Sheila. Given who he is, how could he not? Up go the stakes.
Can Sheila matter even more to Will? Sure. After Will learns that Sheila has been murdered, we learn the true depths of his feelings for her:
I moved over to the desk, bent down, and reached into the back of the bottom drawer. I pulled out the velour box, took a deep breath, and opened it.
The ring's diamond was one-point-three carats, with G color, VI rating, round cut. The platinum bank was simple with two rectangle baguettes. I'd bought it from a booth in the diamond district on 47th Street two weeks ago.
The story might end here, but soon after this Will learns that the woman he knows as Sheila left a daughter. Up go the stakes yet again. At Sheila's funeral, Will looks into the casket—and the true Sheila Rogers is not his girlfriend. So who is his girlfriend, and where is she? Will needs to find her more than ever.
Will's personal stakes constantly rise, and so does our interest in the outcome of Coben's tense and twisty thriller.
Neo-noir mystery novelist Michael Connelly also has been on The New York Times best-seller list, breaking out with the gripping stand-alone novel The Poet. For purposes of discussing personal stakes, however, it might be instructive to have a look at how Connelly handles personal stakes vis-a-vis an ongoing series protagonist: Hieronymous (Harry) Bosch. City of Bones finds Harry w
ell established as a Los Angeles homicide detective. What possibly can make a new case matter to him more than the many that have come before?
Connelly makes this challenge even more difficult for himself in City of Bones when the bones of a boy, buried twenty years ago, are discovered in a shallow hillside grave by a doctor who is out walking his dog. Harry's supervisor, Lieutenant Grace Billets, is none too excited about this discovery:
"These kind of cases, Harry . . ."
"What?"
"They drain the budget, they drain man power ... and they're the hardest to close, if you can close them."
"Okay, I'll climb back up there and cover the bones up. I'll tell the doctor to keep his dog on a leash."
"Come on, Harry, you know what I mean."
Harry himself seems detached, but Connelly quickly tips us off that Harry won't remain indifferent for long:
Child cases haunted you. They hollowed you out and scarred you. There was no bulletproof vest thick enough to stop you from being pierced. Child cases left you knowing the world was full of lost light.
Sure enough, Harry learns that the study of the bones by forensic anthropologist Dr. William Golliher yields a horrifying story:
"Bones can tell us much about how a person lived and died," Golliher said somberly. "In cases of child abuse, the bones do not lie. The bones become our final evidence." . . .
"Let me start by saying that we are learning quite a bit from the recovered artifacts," the anthropologist said. "But I have to tell you guys, I've consulted on a lot of cases but this one blows me away. I was looking at these bones and taking notes and I looked down and my notebook was smeared. I was crying, man. I was crying and I didn't even know it at first."
He looked back at the outstretched bones with a look of tenderness and pity. Bosch knew that the anthropologist saw the person who was once there.
"This one is bad, guys. Real bad."
Golliher goes on to describe the boy's lifelong skeletal trauma and chronic abuse. The boy spent most of his life healing or being hurt, in constant pain. Some bone breaks went unset. The ribs record the beatings the boy received almost year by year. Harry walks to the restroom:
Bosch walked to the sink and looked at himself in the mirror. His face was red. He bent down and used his hands to cup cold water against his face and eyes. He thought about baptisms and second chances. Of renewal. He raised his face until he was looking at himself again.
I'm going to get this guy.
Now Harry's personal stakes are set. The case has gotten to him. He cares. Connelly does not stop there, however. Quickly a suspect develops, a pedophile named Nicholas Trent who lived in the neighborhood. When Trent commits suicide the department has an opportunity to close the case. At a departmental meeting, Harry states that it is too soon to pin the murder on Trent and, indeed, he may not have been guilty, since the boy systematically was abused for a long period of time. There is pressure on him, but he resists it:
Bosch understood that everyone sitting in the room knew that the closing of a case of this nature was the longest of long shots. The case had drawn growing media attention, and Trent with his suicide had now presented them with a way out. Suspicions could be cast on the dead pedophile, and the department could call it a day and move on to the next case—hopefully one with a better chance of being solved.
Bosch could understand this but not accept it. He had seen
the bones. He had heard Golliher run down the litany of injuries. In that autopsy suite Bosch had resolved to find the killer and close the case. The expediency of department politics and image management would be second to that.
The pressure to sell out plays against Harry's nature and need to find the truth: the real truth. Discovering it takes on the proportions of a calling, as we learn when Golliher later challenges Harry on the importance of faith (he means religious faith) in their work. Harry responds in a passage that shows how intensely personal the case has become for him:
"You're wrong about me. I have faith and I have a mission. Call it blue religion, call it whatever you like. It's the belief that this won't just go by. That those bones came out of the ground for the reason. That they came out of the ground for me to find, and for me to do something about. And that's what holds me together and keeps me going. And it won't show up on any X-ray either. Okay?"
A couple of plot developments further deepen Harry's stakes. First, the female rookie cop whom he has begun seeing is fatally shot during the detention of a witness. Tragic as this is, Harry's breach of police force rules about relationships between supervisors and patrolwomen lands him in career-threatening hot water. Because Harry is a "shit magnet" who has drawn more than his share of controversy over time, it becomes increasingly likely that he will be transferred to a position so tedious that he will be forced to resign.
These setbacks make him only more determined to find out who killed the boy twenty years earlier. And Harry does. Connelly has won the Edgar, Anthony, Macavity and Nero Wolfe awards, and his books sell like mad. No wonder. His readers care passionately about Harry Bosch because Harry Bosch cares passionately about whatever cases are thrown his way.
Men don't have a lock on personal stakes, of course, and in no novel can we see that more clearly than in Anita Diamant's The Red Tent, which I discussed earlier. The narrator of Diamant's novel is a minor Old Testament character, Dinah, the daughter of Leah and Jacob. In the novel's opening, we find out why Dinah is so compelled to tell her story:
My name means nothing to you. My memory is dust.
This is not your fault, or mine. The chain connecting mother to daughter was broken and the word passed to the keeping of men, who had no way of knowing. That is why I became a footnote, my story a brief detour between the well-known history of my father, Jacob, and the celebrated chronicle of Joseph, my brother. On those rare occasions when I was remembered, it was as a victim.
Dinah simply wishes to be remembered the way she actually was. There is another reason, too, why she is compelled to tell her story, as we learn when Dinah, an only daughter, explains why her four mothers longed for more girls in a family richly endowed with boys:
But the other reason women wanted daughters was to keep their memories alive. Sons did not hear their mothers' stories after weaning. So I was the one. My mother and my mother-aunties told me endless stories about themselves. No matter what their hands were doing—holding babies, cooking, spinning, weaving—they filled my ears.
In the ruddy shade of the red tent, the menstrual tent, they ran their fingers through my curls, repeating the escapades of their youths, the sagas of their childbirths. Their stories were like offerings of hope and strength poured out before the Queen of Heaven, only these gifts were not for any god or goddess—but for me.
I can still feel how my mothers loved me.
Dinah wishes for the women in her life to be remembered, too. Those would be sufficient reasons to occasion Dinah's long and layered tale, but Diamant continues to raise the personal stakes as the novel unfolds. Dinah's bonds with the women around her grow, ultimately becoming mystical. In contrast to her father Jacob's god, the women, out of the men's sight, maintain the worship of the earth goddess, as Dinah's mother explains to her during a visit to Dinah's fabled grandmother, Rebecca, wife of Isaac, now an oracle:
"The great mother whom we call Innana gave a gift to woman that is not known among men, and this is the secret of blood. The flow at the dark of the moon, the healing blood of the moon's birth—to men, this is flux and distemper, bother and pain. They imagine we suffer and consider themselves lucky. We do not disabuse them.
"In the red tent, the truth is known. In the red tent, where days pass like a gentle stream, as the gift of Innana courses through us, cleansing the body of last month's death, preparing the body to receive the new month's life, women give thanks—for repose and restoration, for the knowledge that life comes from between our legs, and that life costs blood."
My mother saw my confusion.
"You cannot understand all of this yet, Dinah," she said. "But soon you will know, and I will make sure that you are welcomed into the woman's life with ceremony and tenderness. Fear not."
Dinah's passage into maturity indeed involves rituals and care that puts the modern era to shame. The world of women, the culture, and the traditions of the red tent shape and define Dinah. Indeed, the company of women ultimately means more to her than the love of men. Telling their story grows in importance. She wants them to be celebrated for their strength, and, in Anita Diamant's richly imagined novel, they are.
What are your protagonist's personal stakes in your current manuscript, and how do they rise? Why does he care? Why might he care more? Without personal stakes, even the highest-voltage thriller is an empty plot exercise. Raise the personal stakes and we will all care what happens in your story no matter whether the plot is boiling or not.
______EXERCISE
Defining Personal Stakes
Step 1: Write down the name of your protagonist.
Step 2: What is her main problem, conflict, goal, need, desire, yearning, or whatever it is driving her through the story? Write that down.
Step 3: What could make this problem matter more? Write down as many new reasons as you can think of. Start writing now.
Step 4: When you run out of reasons, ask yourself what could make this problem matter even more than that? Write down even more reasons.
Step 5: When you run out of steam, ask yourself what could make this problem matter more than life itself? Write down still more reasons.
Follow-up work: For all the ways to deepen the personal stakes that you created above, work out how to incorporate each into your novel. Include at least six. Make notes now.
Conclusion: Every protagonist has a primary motive for doing what he must do. It would not be much of a story without that. Outward motives are easy to devise from plot circumstances, but inner motives most powerfully drive a character forward. Don't just look at all the possibilities, here. Use all of them. That is exactly what raising personal stakes is all about. It is extra work, for sure, but the result will be a more gripping novel.