Raising the Stakes

How much thought do you give to what's on the line for your characters?

There are three types of stakes:

External stakes impact the character's world. They revolve around the story's larger context.
Internal stakes impact a character's emotions and thoughts and in turn compel them to act.
Personal stakes impact what a character wants to do and why they do it.

Do you agree that the higher the stakes, the more likely the story is to be a page-turner?

Types of Stakes in a Story to Engage Readers

 

No, I don't think higher stakes necessarily make a story more compelling or more of a page-turner. At some point, I grow weary of the world being on the line over and over again. I may have less interest in that storyline than one where the stakes are personal to a character and matter little to anyone else. This is especially true of series where authors feel the need to increase the stakes more with every installment, to the point where the effort to one-up the prior story starts to get ridiculous.

Personal/internal stakes are often most interesting to me.

 

Me, too. The human story never fails to touch the reader.

 

I heard an interesting fact on this topic. Soap operas use a pattern of cliff hanger, cliff hanger, resolution. Repeat. To keep tension high over the series.

 

I heartily agree. Moreover, authorial sadism isn't attractive. If I think the author is arbitrarily "raising the stakes"on a character just to put the character through the mill, I walk away. Whatever happens to the character should proceed naturally from who he or she is and from the situation they're living through.

 

Stakes work hand-in-hand with adversity. You can play with the dials of either to make it feel natural but compelling. Or you can skew the dials to extremes end up with absurdist comedy (high stakes meek adversity, or low stakes strong adversity). That mouse catching movie with the Christopher Walken rests somewhere around the former.

Also I try to think of stakes in a past/present/future way instead of only a present/future way. The past needs sweat in the game too, or its perception at least.

 

I like the story grid method for this of putting the scenes into a spreadsheet and tracking, whether the outcome is positive or negative for the characters. And rating the stakes of the scene. So everything isn't positive or negative, and the stakes move from one to ten gradually increasing through the act.

 

This.

 

To me, the higher the stakes the more likely to be an action-packed book. Stakes, or degree of conflict, spring the characters into action, but it also depends on the quality of the conflict and how well it describe a single character.

I feel the advice of raising the stakes at times is a shortcut into not questioning who your character is, by making an obstacle so obviously wrong that the character cannot but try to overcome it.

 

The stakes in an action genre are external, so you are accurate there. But what about the moral and ethical internal stakes? The character witnesses a crime. Does the character report what they saw, and accept the consequences of possible reprisal by the criminal, or do they keep quite and stay safe?

 

If the stakes of the past are still actively part of the character's situation, then isn't that dealing with the present? We're dealing with stakes in the main story. What's at stake for the character is a question that runs parallel to the plot. I guess I'm a little confused about the stakes of the past and the future fitting in with this. I don't think what the stakes were before a story starts or what they will be after a story ends raise the stakes or affect them much in the present story.

 

I agree with you on a lot of what you're saying, but I think you can still have big stakes that aren't all the end of the world, but can have potentially truly devastating consequences for your characters. A house in foreclosure. Not having enough food for your kids. Running out of gas in a bad neighborhood. These are all external situations that could come with pretty high stakes. It's still survival at stake, right? I don't think you want just an internal struggle at stake. I'm not saying that can't work for some stories, but I think most of the time it's something in the plot that raises the stakes for the characters.

 

This strikes me as more of a semantics issue. When we talk about the end of the world, how are we defining that? Is it the World, planet Earth? Or is it the World of our current society?

Your own examples here could be examples of the end of the characters normal world, and the normal world for his family, if the MCs survival is at stake. The lack of definition, causes interpretations that do not fit the intended concept.

 

I was saying quiet stakes can still be detrimental, and the writer has the ability to decide how crucial a situation is for a character, raising the stakes in a quieter setting.

I'm not sure what you're trying to say here about a definition and concept. We're talking about stakes and raising stakes in a story. I think my examples show ways to do that without there needing to be an alien attack.

 

I am saying that, how we define the term 'end of the world', determines the stakes we are talking about.
Misunderstanding that, can cause a new author to resort to the alien invasion. A better definition helps those trying to learn avoid over escalating.

 

If someone wants to write about an alien invasion, that's fine. I think my posts were clear that it's not the only way to rase the stakes in a story. Sorry if you misunderstood what I was saying.

 

I think both high stakes and low stakes can be page turners, it depends on many factors. I read a short story here about a lighthouse keeper that had some more low or personal stakes. I enjoyed it. I seem to prefer reading and immersing myself in high stakes stories, but I wouldn't want to read them all the time.

Variety is good.

 

I understood, I was just trying to clarify things for newer writers.

 

Sure, yeah, how someone perceives his past could be seen itself as a present/future issue. I just categorise them differently in my mind.

 

Who we were, shapes who we are, which shapes who we will become.

 

What shapes us is our experiences. Live and learn. When something is at stake, we learn the quickest.

 

One thing I would add is stake alignment. I think one common method of story telling has two stakes (one in main plot and one in sub plot) diametrically opposed.

For example, the heroine must crack the case to put the serial killer behind bars and keep from killing again. But she’s a single mother, and working too much risks getting child protection services involved. The tension comes when making progress on one sacrifices the other. I tend not to like these, because it often feels like two different stories jammed together and the subplot feels like filler, but it is super common.

I prefer the opposite method, however, when the two stakes are in complete alignment. Let’s say the detective failed at solving an earlier case and some people died. Then the current case becomes the redemption opportunity. You have one set of stakes, the safety of the next potential victim, and the other, the one shot at redemption. Both either succeed or fail.

There’s also blends of the two. For example, in Gladiator the two stakes are inextricably linked but opposed (get revenge or save Rome… and the man he used to be).

 

As I am sitting here working on two stories that are just not working, it's becoming clearer to me that the higher the stakes, the more absorbing the story will be. The reader doesn't care if Johnny passes his finals or Marilou finds the perfect gift at the Curiosity Shop. Personal stakes have to be higher than that. They have to be life-changing. They have to reveal some grand truth. They have to bring the character to the edge and back. This is true for all novels.