WRITING YOUR SCREENPLAY: STAKES
You might know the feeling when the card dealer asks, “What’s your wager?” You put down fifty dollars, hoping the amount will multiply; hoping that with the money you win, you can save a loved one from some terrible fate…. Knowing full well that IF you lose, your lifeline could all disappear.
The term stakes is thrown around in the realm of film and TV with reckless abandon.
“What are the stakes?”
“It feels like there should be more at stake.”
“Bigger stakes!”
Because it’s tossed around so much, the word “stakes” sometimes loses power and effectiveness. When we’re not sure how to define stakes, we can be less effective at raising them or even implementing notes about them.
When we hear “BIGGER stakes!” sometimes our instinct is to inflate the equivalent of the monetary amount wagered at the crap table.
“Not 50 dollars! I said 50,000 dollars!” That’s a much larger amount and surely it would feel more devastating to lose it. Thinking of stakes as simply the AMOUNT being wagered won’t necessarily help to build a reader’s emotional investment in the story.
Amounts and numbers are impersonal. Characters—people—are personal.
It’s not the money on the table, but what’s lost IF that money disappears.
When someone says “BIGGER stakes” they don’t necessarily mean that IF the main character fails, everyone on earth will perish.
Stakes are personal. Stakes are everything the character stands to lose IF they fail. Stakes are only as meaningful to us as they are to the main character we identify with and love.
When contemplating stakes, IF is a magic word. Notice we have capitalized it throughout this post. We all have personal “IFs” in our life….
This is why anxious people often make good writers. It’s about being able to visualize the worst, most devastating outcome IF something goes wrong.
Let’s look at how a few scripts raise stakes and build up our emotional investment in the story. Notice that in none of these scripts is the hero trying to save the whole globe from collapse.
When you get the note to up the stakes in your script, remember —
“IF” is the magic word, e.g. - “IF X happens, then catastrophic Y will result…”
Stakes are more compelling if they are deeply personal. What does the character need? What happens IF they fail or don’t get it?
Stakes are more effective if the audience can INFER them
IF you have any questions about these or other scripts in the library, feel free to e-mail us at library@wgfoundation.org
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