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In 2006, when I started writing the book that would eventually become my debut novel The True Confessions of First Lady Freeman , I shared my first, tentative pages with a friend and asked for feedback. The main character was Rebecca, a thirty-five-year-old, newly divorced woman who is co-parenting with her ex-husband and starting to date again. Basically me, at that time, except that unlike mine, Rebecca’s ex was a pastor. My friend’s feedback was brief and blunt: “This is okay… but kind of boring. I want to see that marriage.”

I did not want to see that marriage. I had just left an unhappy marriage, and I wasn’t keen on creating a fictional one and dwelling in it for the time it would take to write a novel.

But I knew my friend was right. There wasn’t much going on in Rebecca’s world, as I had written it. Co-parenting and dating each have the potential for high drama, but not a novel’s worth, not in and of themselves.

Worst of all, nothing was at stake for Rebecca. She had nothing to lose. What was the worst thing that could happen? A bad date? A custody fight? Was that the book I wanted to write?

Even the character’s name was snoozy. No shade to Rebeccas, but the one in the draft was giving Sunnybrook Farm.

I’m aware that I’m writing this as if someone else wrote that dry-ass draft. But it was me, suffering from no-slash-low-stakes-first-draft-itis, a self-diagnosed condition that also plagues my short fiction. Thankfully, there is a cure. Whether I’ve completed an underwhelming first draft or am still in the process of writing one, here are a few strategies I use to move my characters and their stories from dud to delicious:

Give them something to want, something to lose

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