Not that Tiffany Yates Martin resembles Mao in any way. But here's her latest post.
The Main Writing Skill You May Be Neglecting. On topic I've been mulling stakes. I see people with dire stakes ...like being burned at the aforementioned. My stakes seem to get lost though I think they are as dire. To die alone and unloved or to actually find the kind of friend that would risk their life to bring me food and water if the Russians invaded. (seriously this always touches me in the stories out of the Ukraine. I can't imagine many neighbours doing this in the American suburbs, though I can in the world my grandparents inhabited.) Does anyone have examples of how to make less dire stakes clear to the reader. I can't think of one at the moment. In a romance aren't the stakes" Is this love real?" "Will it last?" I've never written a romance so I'm legitimately asking the Q of those who know the genre. Is it just will they, won't they have sex? Any other examples of defining non lethal stakes, that are gripping?
Okay, because we forget this, I suggest returning to news writing 101 (of the mind). When we start out, we are told to find a story. We think, I need a story. Nuclear war, now that's a story. But I don't have a nuclear war to write about. Damn. I don't have a story to write.
But then some pompous prof starts talking about onions (back before Shrek nailed this lesson down for us), and has us look at images from deep space, capturing the entirety of the solar system, and images from an electron microscope, capturing what looks like the same thing from a single cell, and after getting stoned and saying "whoaaah" a lot, we realize that we have always had the scope we need inside us (whoooah). I'm thinking back to one of the last decent pieces of journalism I managed. I was writing about Chernobyl, but nuclear annilation is too much to capture in a story, so I focused on one guy, and his desperate search for the perfect childhood he lost when the reactor went critical.
I thought it worked because his story was kind of universal, minus the heavy radiation and mom's hair falling out.
The hurdles we face when finding love include those you've talked about, and Stacey mentioned others.
I think the desire for a friend who would risk themsleves for us, and for whom we would risk ourslves is a brilliant one, btw.
But, deep down, there are others and the stakes of the heart are crazy high.
Some universal, emotional truths:
Do I deserve love?
How could anyone ever love me?
Can I survive the pain of this love ending? Is it worth beginning?
Is love even an answer? Is love all we need?
Was Danny's song bullshit?
And, of course, who, exactly, who wrote the book of love?