The Gilded Age: 5 Steps To Raise The Stakes in Your Screenplay

The Gilded Age: 5 Steps To Raise The Stakes in Your Screenplay This week, we are going to be talking about how to raise the stakes in your screenwriting and TV writing. This is probably one of the most confusing notes that writers tend to get from producers, and one of the most popular.  “Raise the stakes! Raise the stakes! Raise the stakes!” But what are stakes? Why is it that you can blow something up, burn $3 million bucks, shoot at a baby, and it can still feel like there are no stakes? And then you can watch a show like The Gilded Age where the stakes are about who's going to come to what dinner party, and feel like the stakes are really high.  Today, we’re going to be talking about what stakes are and how they work. And I'm going to give you a simple five step process that you can follow to make sure that stakes are happening in your screenplay, without feeling like you have to blow something up every time you get a note from a producer.  One of the biggest confusions about how to raise the stakes in your screenplay or TV pilot is thinking that stakes are about what happens in your script.    The Gilded Age is proof that this is certainly not the case. What happens in your screenplay is actually a lot less important than what it means to the character that the “what happens” is happening to.  And even that is much less important than what is driving the character that it's happening to.  Because if something's happening to a character, but we're not actually connected to what matters to that character and the journey of that character, then what happens doesn't really matter.  And that's why you can do a lot of big spectacular things to your character and still have the feeling that there are no stakes in your screenplay.   Stakes begin with empathy. Raising the stakes in your screenplay begins with developing empathy for your characters. We feel stakes when we connect to a character on the big screen or little screen, and we see a tiny piece of ourselves up there, we connect to them, we empathize with them, we feel what it would feel like to be in their shoes.  This is why we cringe when we watch Curb Your Enthusiasm. And this is why we care when we watch The Gilded Age.  It's not because of the “what's happens” to your character. It's because of the “what does it mean?” to the character.  And in order to develop that “what does it mean?” to the character, there are a couple steps that you can follow.    STEP #1: To raise the stakes in your screenplay or pilot, make sure you know what the character wants.  The more specific you can be about what they want, the better.  Notice, I'm not talking about the audience yet. There's a whole other level of structure that I call secondary structure that we build, which is about how you communicate this stuff to the audience. And that stuff is really complicated; that takes a long time to learn, a lot of practice and experience. Whereas these skills that I'm giving you are skills that you can actually use right now, very intuitively, without having a tremendous amount of craft behind you.  Start out by asking yourself: “do I know what the character wants?” You'll be surprised how often you realize that you don't! And if you don’t know, don't freak out!  If you realize “okay, I've got a bunch of cool stuff happening, I got some cool images, I got some cool lines of dialogue, but I actually don't know what the character wants…”  Okay, well, choose something!    When building stakes in your screenplay, the “what” of what your character wants matters much less than the fact that your character wants something.