Writers Only Need to Get One Thing Right

Have you ever had a friend tell you a boring story that you wished would just end? Now imagine that the story lasted two hours and you paid twenty bucks to hear it. Most people would be severely let down. Maybe I’ve seen too many movies at this point, but more often than not when I’m leaving the theater after watching a movie that I didn’t connect with, the three words I most often say are “I felt nothing.” 

People enjoy stories that make them feel something; whether that’s a friend recounting their weekend or an epic novel.  Happiness, fear, danger – these are all powerful emotions and are central to crafting compelling stakes in any story. The audience, or reader, needs to care what happens to your characters. There needs to be specific outcomes to hope or fear for, and there should be something tangible and impactful on the line should the characters fail in achieving their goals. While this may seem basic, it’s by far the most common note that I give on scripts. If the stakes aren’t emotional or meaningful, then I don’t care about the story.

Creating stakes is easy. If the superhero doesn’t stop the bad guy, the world will be destroyed. Those are the stakes of a story. But if that’s all it took, then every superhero movie would be an Oscar contender. The key word, for me, is “emotional.” It’s the reason why, at the end of COCO (2017) when Miguel sings Remember Me to Mama Coco, we all cry like babies (or I did, at least). 

Stakes are the one thing that writers absolutely need to get right. It doesn’t matter if your tightly paced action scenes redefine the genre or if your dialogue would make Shakespeare or Sorkin jealous; if the reader doesn’t care about your story, it’s dead. The way that writers make readers care about the story is by crafting emotional stakes.