Mythologize Your Characters to “Up the Ante”
Here is a trick from Shakespeare. The next time you are putting a fictional story together, have a good look at your characters and their relationships. What are they? Friends? Work colleagues? Strangers?
One way to “raise the stakes” in drama is to “connect” your characters more closely.
For example, sisters and brothers fighting is more interesting than strangers doing the same. Husbands and wives trying to kill each other are much more intriguing than psychos stalking unknown victims.
Always try to up the ante.
Now - see your characters as even bigger! Queen and Consort, not just sister and brother.
Not just husband and wife but God and nymph. Not just employee and boss but janitor and CEO.
It’s a theatrical technique as old as Ancient Greece, but it still works. To make your characters “classic”, you create archetypes of people who are larger than life. Why have a girl in a dead-end job hating her boss and eventually winning through when you could have a successful businesswoman, with millions to lose, fighting against a multinational conglomerate?
You see, readers like big fights, they like stories where it’s do or die.
For instance, you have a story about a schoolteacher fighting to preserve a gym facility.
Good, but take it further—mythologize it. Make it a struggle between good and evil—between the oppression of the authorities and freedom of speech.
Never be afraid to take on the larger issues in your work. Try to get to the core of human values.
Shakespeare did it well. On the surface, he wrote about Kings and Queens but beneath, he wrote about all of us. Hamlet is a case in point. On one level, it is a play about a King who is not ready to take the throne. On another, it is a thesis on adolescence.
Think through the opportunities that life and death issues might offer your writing. Reality is good. But bigger is better—take it from Shakespeare.
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