Internal vs External Stakes: How to Make Audiences Actually Care

Learn from Emmy-nominated writing partners and producers whose credits include Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale, USA's The Purge, and more.

Walk away with a practical framework for diagnosing and fixing stake problems in your script — starting today.

Every story lives or dies on one question: does the audience care? Not just about what happens next, but about who it's happening to. Stakes are the engine that drives that emotional investment — and when they're working, your audience is leaning forward in their seat, holding their breath, emotionally tied to your character's every decision. But when they're off — even slightly — viewers check out, readers put the book down, and executives pass. Understanding how to identify, build, and balance the stakes in your story isn't just a craft skill. It's the difference between a screenplay that gets remembered and one that gets forgotten before the meeting ends.

Most writers know stakes matter. What's harder to pin down is why they keep slipping. You've got a great concept. The plot is moving. The scenes are well-written. And yet something feels flat, and you can't explain it. Sound familiar? That's almost always a stakes problem — specifically, an imbalance between your internal and external stakes. External stakes are the visible dangers: arrest, death, failure, loss. But without internal stakes — the deeply personal reasons your character is fighting for anything at all — those external dangers feel hollow. We don't fear fictional punishment for fictional people. We fear alongside characters when we see ourselves in them. The writers who struggle most with this are the ones who've front-loaded their plot at the expense of their character's inner world, never stopping to ask: why would this person take this kind of risk? That's the question that unlocks everything.

Your guides in this webinar are Emmy-nominated writers and producers Nina Fiore and John Herrera — a writing partnership forged across some of television's most emotionally intense, high-stakes storytelling. You know their work: Hulu's The Handmaid's Tale, USA's The Purge, Syfy's Nightflyers, Blood Drive, Alphas, and Eureka. They've sold original pilots to CW and Freeform, adapted a feminist western novel for MGM, and co-wrote Nancy Drew and the Hidden Staircase for Warner Brothers — with a Netflix series, Bloom, on the way. These are writers who have spent their careers inside stories where the stakes — internal and external — couldn't be higher. They didn't just study this craft. They've lived it, script after script, room after room, at the highest levels of the industry.

In this webinar, you'll get a clear breakdown of internal vs. external stakes and the top three mistakes writers make when trying to balance them. You'll learn how to create genuine audience connection by grounding your story in personal, universal, and culturally relevant themes — and how to build rich context for your character before the story's central conflict even begins. From there, you'll explore how to construct real character drive, how to find big drama in small, honest problems, and how to push conflict to its highest possible pitch without cheating your audience or losing their trust. By the time you leave, you'll have a concrete set of tools to diagnose stake problems in your current script, fix them, and make sure every scene you write from here on out earns the audience's full attention.

Praise for Nina and John's Stage 32 Teaching:

"It's easy to see why these two are Emmy-nominated!" - Morgan L.

"Nina and John are fantastic. Not only as writers on one of my favorite shows ever, but as educators. I really learned so much from them. Thank you." - Martina M. 

"Wow. I'm blown away by the quality of teaching with this one. Some of the best educators on Stage 32." - Rishi L.