Episode Transcript: 5 Steps to Raise the Stakes in Your Screenplay

Why “Raise the Stakes” Is Such a Confusing Note

Raise the stakes. Raise the stakes. Raise the stakes. This is probably one of the most confusing notes that people tend to get from producers, and one of the most popular.

But what are stakes? And why is it that you can blow something up, burn $3 million, shoot at a baby, and it can still feel like there are no stakes?

And then you can watch a movie like Past Lives, A Real Pain, In the Mood for Love, Withnail & I, Junebug or Lost in Translation, where so little actually happens — or a show like The Gilded Age, where the stakes are who’s going to come to what dinner party — and feel like the stakes are actually really high.

So what are stakes? How do they work? I’m going to give you a simple five-step process that you can follow to make sure that stakes are actually happening in your screenplay, without feeling like you have to blow something up every time you get a note from a producer.

Stakes Begin with Empathy

I think one of the biggest confusions about stakes is that people think that stakes are about what happens. Stakes actually begin with empathy.

We feel stakes when we connect to a character on the screen — big screen or small screen — and we see a tiny piece of ourselves up there. We feel what it would feel like to be in their shoes.

This is why we cringe when we watch Curb Your Enthusiasm. It’s not because of what’s happening. It’s because of what it means to the character.

And in order to develop that what does it mean to the character, there are a couple of steps that you can follow.

Step 1: Know What Your Character Wants

The first step is really, really simple: 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, which is about how you communicate this stuff to the audience. And that stuff’s really complicated — it takes a long time to learn, a lot of practice and experience.

Whereas the skills I’m giving you right now are skills that you can actually use very intuitively, without having a tremendous amount of craft behind you.

So just start out by asking: do I know what the character wants? You’ll be surprised how often you realize that you don’t.

And if you don’t, don’t freak out. Okay, I’ve got a bunch of cool stuff happening. I’ve got some cool images, I’ve got some cool lines of dialogue, but I actually don’t know what the character wants. Okay — well, choose something.

Because the what of what your character wants matters much less than the fact that your character wants something. If you don’t know what your character wants, don’t stress about it. Look around the room and pick up something. This character wants a staple remover.

You might think that a staple remover is a pretty crappy object to build a scene around. But again, what it is doesn’t actually matter. I’m going to teach you how we can build the same things we would have in an action movie around a staple remover.

Step 2: Externalize Desire Through Action

Here’s how that works. When you’re writing a screenplay, you need to externalize those internal desires. And the way we externalize those internal desires is through action.

We need our character to take action so that we can raise the stakes. Stakes come from your character doing things.

Notice, we’re still not talking about the audience. We’re not talking about how to communicate that Jake wants the staple remover to the audience. We’re just asking: does Jake want the staple remover? Is he taking steps to get it? Okay, he just picked it up. He’s taking a step to get it.

But you probably noticed that there still feel like there are no stakes. He wanted a staple remover. He came into his office, he picked up a staple remover, he started removing some staples. What we have now is a super boring scene with no stakes.

And it would be exactly the same thing if Jake picked up a briefcase with $3 trillion in it. If your character just gets what they want without even having to try, there are going to be no stakes in your script — because we’re never going to know how much Jake actually wants this staple remover, what Jake was willing to do for the staple remover, what the staple remover means to him.

We won’t be able to tell ourselves that story unless we do step number three.

Step 3: Raise the Stakes by Making It Hard

So: number one, do you know what they want? Number two, are they taking active steps to get it? Number three, make it hard.

I take the same staple remover. But this time, when Jake shows up at his office to remove the staples that he loves to remove, the staple remover is gone. It is not in its traditional place on his desk.

So he starts looking around. He starts shuffling through the papers on his desk. He upends his laptop. He starts pulling all the books off of his shelves. He starts rifling through drawers.

Now the whole office is a total disaster. He overturns the bureau, looking behind it. He pulls all the objects out of his closet.

We might not even know what Jake is looking for yet. But do you see how the stakes suddenly raised? The stakes raised because Jake is now making choices that he would not normally make to get the staple remover.

We don’t even need to know what the object he’s seeking is. We can start to feel empathy. We can start to care, because we can see how important this object is to Jake.

Along the way, we’re also doing something really cool: we’re getting to learn more about Jake. You knew Jake as the nice guy who does podcasting. You didn’t know the insane Jake who’s willing to destroy his entire office looking for a staple remover.

And what starts to happen is we start to empathize. We start to hope that Jake gets whatever Jake is looking for. We start to feel how important it is, even though it’s just a staple remover.

Step 4: Make It Harder

Step number four: make it harder. And I love this step, because this is a step that most screenwriters mess up on.

When your character is down, that’s when you want to kick him. When your character is struggling, that’s where you want to make it even harder.

There’s a part of us that sees ourselves in these characters, and we don’t want to hurt them. We love them. They’re our babies. But we have to torture them. We have to make it hard, and then we have to make it harder — because if it doesn’t get harder, we’re never going to get to really know the character.

So Jake goes through his entire office. He fails to find the staple remover. It’s now a disaster. He’s now working his way through his house, overturning everything. He’s in the kitchen dumping things out of the junk drawer. He’s in the garage pulling boxes off of the shelves. He is looking everywhere, until his search for the staple remover is completely dead. It is not in this house.

That’s when he realizes he’s going to have to go to Staples and buy a new one. So he goes to get in his car. The car won’t freaking start. The battery is dead — he left the door open last night. He’s got to get to Staples. So he starts ringing the doorbells of his friends. No, nobody’s home. Nobody’s home. Nobody’s home.

Oh — that one neighbor across the street is home. Now, the truth is, my neighbors are the nicest people in the world, but we’re just going to pretend that that’s the bad neighbor. That’s the neighbor that nobody talks to, especially Jake. That’s the neighbor that stole his snowblower when he loaned it to him. That’s the neighbor who’s constantly spreading rumors in the neighborhood. That’s the neighbor who brings his dog over to poop in Jake’s yard. That is the horrible neighbor, and Jake has sworn to never speak to him again.

But there he is, sitting beside his nicely polished Chevy Bolt. His car can get Jake to Staples. And we watch Jake lower his head and his pride and slug across the street to go talk to that neighbor, to go prostrate himself and ask for that car so that he can get to Staples.

Do you see how the stakes raised and raised and raised and raised? We now actually can understand how important this is to Jake — that Jake is actually talking to the neighbor.

And we’re also getting to see a different side of Jake. Before, we saw the maniac Jake, dumping stuff off his bookshelves, destroying his house looking for something. Now we are seeing the humbled Jake.

Jake is making a choice that Jake has never made before. This is probably not the first time that Jake has knocked everything off his shelves looking for some object he couldn’t find — he went to that really quick. But now we’re getting Jake to make the choices that he wouldn’t make before.

And notice, we still haven’t actually done any exposition for the audience. For all the audience knows, they might not even know that it’s a staple remover that Jake is going across the street for. They just know that Jake’s car won’t start, he’s looking for something, and now he is prostrating himself before this horrible neighbor who’s going to torture him before finally Jake can win that car, or a ride, or a jump start, or whatever it takes for Jake to get to Staples. A ride would probably be the best, because then we get to build more relationship between him and the next-door neighbor.

Stakes Grow Out of Structure, Not Plot

So do you see how we built stakes off of this random object? This is so important. This is the difference between plot and structure.

We think that our stakes are growing out of our plot, but they are not. Our stakes are growing out of our structure. And our structure grows out of what your character wants and what makes it hard.

If you do these four steps — number one, do I know what the character wants? Number two, are they taking active steps to get it? Number three, am I making it hard? Number four, am I making it harder? — you’re going to be 70% of the way to building stakes.

Step 5: Connect to the Emotional Need

There is one more layer to stakes that is more intuitive, more complicated. And this is step number five: connecting to the emotional need of your character.

Now, at the studio, we teach some more advanced techniques for connecting to emotional needs — meditative techniques and hypnotic techniques — because a lot of us as people are disconnected from our emotional needs. We’re connected to the tangible things we want.

We know we want to win an Academy Award. We know we want the big contract. We know we want the new car. We know we want the lover of our dreams. We know we want the vacation. We know we want the staple remover. We know the things that we want, but we are often disconnected from the emotional needs underneath.

Why Fiction Needs the Emotional Need Underneath

This is especially true in movies and TV shows. In real life, there’s a real staple remover. If I’m in a car chase, it’s a real car chase.

But in a movie, in a TV show, on some level, even though we’re suspending disbelief, we know it’s not real. We know it’s fiction. It’s not a real $3 trillion that we just burned. It’s not a real baby that we just shot at. It is not real bullets. It is not a real heist. That’s why we need the emotional need underneath.

At the end of the day, if Jake is going for a staple remover just to get staples, there is a limit to how much we are going to care about it.

But if Jake is going for the staple remover because Jake needs justice — because people are always taking his staple remover, because things are always disappearing from his life — there’s going to be a whole other level of emotional charge to that journey.

If Jake is going for a staple remover because he needs validation, and he’s got to get his application in, there’s going to be a whole different level of feeling to that. It’s going to inflect every word he says, every action he takes. It is going to change who he is.

If it’s about respect, if it’s about connection, if it’s about love, if it’s about meaning, if it’s about transcendence, if it’s about safety — these are the things that actually tie us together as human beings. These are the things that give us connection, and these are the things that build empathy.

You don’t have to tell people the emotional need. Just like in life, you don’t need to tell people your emotional need. We feel the emotional need. That’s where the empathy comes from.

You can feel when somebody is actually emotionally connected to what they’re going for versus when they are going through the motions. And you can feel the difference in stakes in your real life when the emotional need is active, in the same way that you can feel the difference in a script when the emotional need is active.

Your Own Wants Are Metaphors, Too

The emotional need is a complex subconscious thing that happens under the surface. And getting to your own emotional needs is really the first step of connecting to your character’s emotional needs.

Sometimes that’s about stripping back the layers between you and what’s actually going on at the surface. That’s about recognizing that your own tangible objects are also metaphors. They are stand-ins that help you believe that the emotional need will be met. They are metaphors for something emotional that is going on with you.

That is why you’re so driven. And that’s not because you’re crazy — that’s because you’re human. This is actually how human psychology works. That’s why it’s how character psychology works. And it’s why it’s connected to stakes.

So all of writing is two parts of our mind. There’s the conscious mind, which is the first four steps: Do I know what they want? Are they taking steps to get it? Am I making it hard? Am I making it harder?

And then there’s the subconscious mind, which is the fifth step: Am I connected? Can I feel the need inside of them?

A Simple Practice: Observe the Need Underneath

If you want to get better at connecting to emotional needs on your own, a simple way to start is just to observe people.

Notice when people are acting a little nuts. When your aunt is driving you crazy over something. When your friend is in a tizzy over something that seems so small. When somebody is driven with passion for something that doesn’t even make sense to you.

When you see people acting a little nuts, whether it’s in a beautiful way or a horrible way, instead of being upset with them, ask yourself: what’s going on underneath? What emotional need are they trying to meet?

Is it love? Is it comfort? Is it justice? Is it validation? Is it respect? Is it meaning? Is it transcendence? Is it safety? Is it connection? What core universal need are they trying to meet?

By observing it in others, it becomes easier to start to recognize it in yourself. And as you start to recognize it in yourself, it becomes easier to pass it on to your characters.