How can you keep your audience hooked when they know the end of the story?

Chas, Stu and Mel take a deep dive into stakes, using then lens of biopics to help us think about them. If an audience already knows the "plot" outcome of a story, then how do you create stakes to make a story tense for the audience?

To explore this, we deep dive into HIDDEN FIGURES (about the NASA Friendship 7 mission), DOWNFALL (the final days of Berlin in WW2), and BRIGHT STAR (the life and death of romantic poet John Keats). We unpack the ideas around internal, external and philosophical /moral stakes and propose some new terminology that may help us write stakes more effectively.

As always: SPOILERS ABOUND.

Audio quotations used for educational purposes only. Timestamps indicated below. Chapter markers included in the mp3.

Thanks to Chris Walker for editing this episode.

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CHAPTERS
- 00:00:00 - Intro
- 00:04:41 - What even are stakes?
- 00:24:26 - Hidden Figures
- 01:00:46 - Downfall
- 01:33:38 - Bright Star
- 02:10:33 - Key Learnings
- 02:18:57 - Thanks Patreons!

DZ-91: Raising (different kinds of) Stakes

Draft Zero: a screenwriting podcast