From Dud to Delicious: Deesha Philyaw on Raising the Stakes in Fiction

This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter—sign up here.

Article continues after advertisement

In 2006, when I started writing the book that would eventually become my debut novel The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman, I shared my first, tentative pages with a friend and asked for feedback. The main character was Rebecca, a thirty-five-year-old, newly divorced woman who is co-parenting with her ex-husband and starting to date again. Basically me, at that time, except that unlike mine, Rebecca’s ex was a pastor. My friend’s feedback was brief and blunt: “This is okay… but kind of boring. I want to see that marriage.”

I did not want to see that marriage. I had just left an unhappy marriage, and I wasn’t keen on creating a fictional one and dwelling in it for the time it would take to write a novel.

But I knew my friend was right. There wasn’t much going on in Rebecca’s world, as I had written it. Co-parenting and dating each have the potential for high drama, but not a novel’s worth, not in and of themselves.

Worst of all, nothing was at stake for Rebecca. She had nothing to lose. What was the worst thing that could happen? A bad date? A custody fight? Was that the book I wanted to write?

Even the character’s name was snoozy. No shade to Rebeccas, but the one in the draft was giving Sunnybrook Farm.

I’m aware that I’m writing this as if someone else wrote that dry-ass draft. But it was me, suffering from no-slash-low-stakes-first-draft-itis, a self-diagnosed condition that also plagues my short fiction. Thankfully, there is a cure. Whether I’ve completed an underwhelming first draft or am still in the process of writing one, here are a few strategies I use to move my characters and their stories from dud to delicious:

Give them something to want, something to lose

I took my friend’s advice and moved Rebecca back into her marriage. After marrying the man of her dreams, she enjoys the respectability, social status, and material trappings of being a megachurch pastor’s wife, aka a first lady. If that marriage falls apart, she has plenty to lose.

My decision to make Rebecca’s husband the pastor of a megachurch also influenced the story and its stakes. A highly visible pastor with a national reputation and his wife have much more to lose if their marriage problems become public, than, say, a poor country preacher and his wife.

But even with this change, I realized I’d written Rebecca into a corner. Despite the perks, she hated being a first lady (as I would), hated being in the spotlight (as I would), and wasn’t sure she even believed in Christianity (like me). Further, Rebecca’s libido was on ten just as her husband, fifteen years her senior, seemed to be losing interest in sex. She’d gotten everything she’d wanted by marrying “up,” but she was still unhappy. If her marriage ended, would she really count it as a loss?

Lesson learned: If a character has already gotten everything they want, give them something else to want.

Enter the First Lady USA pageant. I created the pageant when I flipped Rebecca, who was miserable being a first lady, into Scharisse, who loved every minute of it. Unfortunately, the other first ladies ostracized her because she lacked the proper church girl pedigree as the daughter of an unwed teenaged mother. Schar wanted nothing more than to be embraced by the other first ladies. So she set her sights on winning the pageant, winning over her fellow contestants along the way, and becoming the ultimate first lady.

To raise the stakes further, I threw an obstacle in Schar’s way—a scandal that could end her marriage as well as her chance at the First Lady USA title. Another tip for raising stakes: Keep making things worse. Figure out what’s the last thing the character wants to happen, or the most unfair or unexpected thing that could happen, or the worst possible thing that could happen—and make it happen.

Timing is everything

Tweaking the timing or timeline in your story can ratchet up the stakes as well. How might starting the story five years later, or earlier, add complexity and challenges? What if The One Who Got Away shows up during your honeymoon phase with your new partner and not on the day after you sign divorce papers?

Not only did I move Rebecca-now-Schar back in time and into her marriage, I aged her daughter, Gabrielle, from five to fifteen. A public scandal and a rocky marriage will have very different implications for a teenager than they will for a kindergartener. And those implications and complications for Gabrielle ended up shaping my novel’s narrative considerably.

Figure out what’s the last thing the character wants to happen, or the most unfair or unexpected thing that could happen, or the worst possible thing that could happen—and make it happen.

The First Lady USA pageant is another example of how timing can raise stakes. Anything with a set date or deadline sets a clock ticking. Something has to happen by or before that event date or deadline, or else there will be consequences for the main characters and/or others. And there can be multiple ticking clocks in the same story. When Scharisse and the other contestants gather to launch the pageant, which is still months away, she has eight days to win over these women who despise her.

No angels, no demons

Give your “good” characters some edge, some flaws. Once I freed Schar up to have values and interests that differed from mine, to make choices I’d never make, and to parent in ways I never would, she became far more interesting. And she had much more to lose.

Likewise, give your bad guys some complexity. I don’t believe villainous or otherwise unlikeable characters need to be redeemed. In fact, I prefer that they aren’t. As a reader and as a writer, I find it much more interesting to see more of them, their layers and contradictions, rather than a healed, improved, repentant version of them, or some heavy-handed, expositional apologia for why they are the way they are.

In my novel, Schar’s archnemesis, head deaconess Sheila Battle, began as a typical judgmental, holier-than-thou church lady. But in my later drafts, I wrote a scene that reveals that there’s much more to Sheila than meets the eye, hilariously so. At the end of the book, Sheila is still judgmental and holier-than-thou. But we’ll never unsee everything else that she is, as well.

*

Twenty years ago, my friend saw something in my budding novel that I didn’t see. Or rather, she saw what was missing: Something at stake. Some compelling answer to the question, “So what?” in response to the particulars of the situation Schar-then-Rebecca found herself in. If nothing mattered, then I didn’t have a story. Not yet.

Once I considered Schar’s desires, reconsidered when in the timeline of her life that we meet her, and made sure she and the other characters were neither impossibly perfect nor cartoonishly evil—then, I had a story.

___________________________________

The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman by Deesha Philyaw is available via Mariner Books.