This brings us to—insert organ music of doom—The Stakes. Every book must have stakes. Something to gain and something to lose. Something to prove, something to disprove. Rehabilitation at the cost of humiliation. Donald Maas, the guru of books about the craft of writing, stresses this over and over again. I would strongly recommend checking out his books. What are “stakes?” These can be large stakes on a national level, like a Senate majority leader is a total hypocrite in terms of rushing through a judicial appointment that only four years earlier he repudiated on record because he’s a lying dirtbag, but he is desperate to get a conservative on the Supreme Court. Said Senate Majority Leader is willing to sacrifice his integrity for that judicial appointment. Or stakes on a very personal level, where the abused wife who turned her husband into the police is abandoned by her children because her husband is now serving his sentence on Death Row. Make sure that the outcome matters to someone important in the book. I firmly believe that there is no free lunch. Like the woman who lost her children because she fingered her husband. Morals are emotionally expensive. They are hard. That is why the struggle to do the right thing is so fraught with tension. Or it should be.
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