Keeping Them on the Barstool: How to Find and Push the Stakes of Your Fiction with KAREN SHEPARD

If fiction is sidling up next to someone at a bar and saying, “Let me tell you a story…,” how do you keep your new friend at the bar on her stool rather than heading off to the restroom?  Let’s spend a few hours together figuring out how to identify and develop the stakes of our fiction.  If your reader is always going to be asking, “Why does this matter?” how do we address that question as writers?  We’ll look at some examples from published work; we’ll do some exercises designed to identify and develop stakes; we’ll remind ourselves that this writing thing we do should always be a matter of life and death.

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