100 Things You Should Know About Writing (Part 1)

3) Stakes and how to use them.

Stakes, along with conflict and character choice, are one of the biggest sources of tension within a story. 

Recapping from my section on tension: Stakes are the cost of failure to achieve the main goal. If your character has a goal for the story and he doesn't achieve it, what happens? 

The world ends! Everyone dies! The world as we know it disappears! The bad guy takes over! 

All of those are good, valid sources of tension if done right. At the same time, I can't help feeling that some writers think that putting life-or-death stakes into the story is the only way of taking the stakes as high as they can go.  

Because it isn't. 

They also seem to think that the only way to keep tension up through the whole book is to keep the stakes at the same high level for the whole story. 

It's not. 

Many new writers assume that there are only a few ways to have stakes create excitement, which often results in trite, over-used plot points that don't actually add as much to the story as they could. Which in turn means that the reader won't respond to the stakes the way the writer intended. 

Think for yourself when you're the reader. Do you suddenly read when bated breath just because the book suddenly says: "Or everyone dies?" 

No. There's something else to the story that makes those stakes work. And that something else is making things personal for the protagonist. Even then, there's something else to that: making the reader care about the protagonist. Or in the very least care what happens to him/her. I'll go into this a bit later, in Section 7. 

However, assuming that the reader cares for your character and you make things personal (note, not bigger, not necessarily life or death), that is when stakes ramp up tension. 

Think about this: What gets you more involved with the story and would have you more tense to see it ending well? 

An NYPD cop hiding out in an office building and going up against a group of villains in order to save the innocent people inside. 

Or: 

An NYPD cop hiding out in an office building and going up against a group of villains in order to save his wife. 

See? Both are life and death. But because the latter is personal, it made millions of dollars in the box office (as Die Hard), because people could not wait to see McLane succeed and be reunited with his wife. This is also arguably why A Good Day to Die Hard sucked as a Die Hard movie. Nothing in A Good Day to Die Hard actually made you care about the outcome, because there was no emotional warmth between the characters, and besides that, they were about as indestructible as Ken dolls, so no worries that they'd actually get hurt by the whole rigmarole. 

Next, I want to address the idea that the stakes should be at the same intensity throughout the story. Honestly, I think of stakes as having diminishing return on investment. By this I mean that the longer you keep the stakes at a certain level, the less of an impact they have on a reader's experience. Unless there are dynamics to the stakes, every reminder of "everyone will die!" will increasingly result in a "so, what else is new" sort of reaction from the reader. 

As such, it's often necessary to change up the stakes as the story progresses in order to keep the tension high for the reader. 

You can do this in two ways: 

1) By increasing the cost of failure as the story progresses. Naturally, increasing cost of failure makes the reader more invested in wishing that failure doesn't happen, which increases the tension. 

This can be done either by making the ramifications bigger (e.g. the whole world comes to an end unless the goal is achieved), or more personal (e.g. by having the protagonist's worst fears be realized if he/she fails). 

2) By making failure more likely. As the story progresses, achieving the goal becomes more difficult, even to the point where the reader can't imagine how the protagonist can succeed, but knows that he/she must. 

For example: Hunger Games. The goal is for Katniss to win the games. However we the readers know from the start that her chances at survival are slim to none from the beginning. But here's the thing that kept us nailed to our books, stressing out about whether she makes it: 

As the games progress, the weakest players get killed and only the strongest players remain. This means that the closer she seems to get to the goal, the more her chances of survival dwindle. And yet, all we want to see is her surviving. 

Another way of making failure more likely is Character Choice, but I'm getting to that next time (Section 4). 

So in summary, stakes can be as varied as your imagination, and you have so many ways in which to use them to your story's advantage. Making the stakes personal or making them dynamic ratchets up tension to fever pitch. My suggestion is to put some thought into your story. Odds are that, if you're feeling like your tension is flagging, your problem lies in your stakes.  

Thanks for reading! Please feel free to ask questions in the comments. I'll try and answer any questions you have relating to stakes, but you're also welcome to ask anything related to writing in general. If your question inspires me to write a new section, I'll work it into my 100 Things to Know and dedicate the section to you. 

Coming up: 

Character Choice

Inciting Incident

More on Goals

The Real Truth Behind Tension