The last blog defined Tension and its role in stories. This blog examines the types of stakes you can use to raise tension to its highest levels.
A good place to begin is with some questions:
What happens if the protagonist fails?
What is at stake? Personally? Publicly? Morally?
Why can’t your protagonist just walk away?
There’s not a lot of tension if the solution is to forget about it and give up. If your character decides whatever is being asked of her isn’t worth it, there’s no story. So you have to figure out what would make your protagonist stay and fight no matter what the stakes?
The answer to that question should be found in your character’s actions and reactions to the rising stakes. Those actions and reactions should be in character and suit your story.
Escalating Stakes
Stakes should escalate through the book, getting harder and harder for the protagonist to go on. It’s not enough to make things complicated, you have to push your characters to their limits and then push some more. Make them suffer. Put them in untenable situations. Force them to choose between two awful options with no room for another solution. There should be no compromise or at least none that is obvious. You could introduce an alternative as a twist.
One way to accomplish rising stakes is to pile on the complications, but do it strategically. If there is a worse time for something to go wrong, that is when it should happen. If there is one person who could help your protagonist, make sure they can’t. They could be in a coma, in outer space or you could kill them to increase the tension. The trick is to keep taking away resources, advantages and assets along the way. Leave your character with nothing.
Force your characters to question everything—their beliefs, their past, their abilities, their commitment. Take them to the edge of sanity and reason, to the edge of their physical ability, and to the edge of their morality, and then add another level beyond that.
Stakes only work when there is tension between the character and the situation. There has to conflict and constant pressure to overcome if you want to keep your reader reading. If one antagonist is good, add a second or a third. If your character does win a battle, make sure the war rages on. Offer no release except to give your readers an emotional break. Unrelenting tension can tire a reader. It depends on the style, genre and tone of your story how relenting you should choose to be.
Types of Stakes
In general, there are two types of stakes characters face: Personal and Public.
Personal Stakes
This is the harder of the two to write. For it to work, readers must be invested and care about the outcome as much as the protagonist does. That is what makes the personal nature of the stakes relatable. If the reader can identify with what is happening or empathize with what the character is facing, then those personal stakes become more and carry more weight.
The way to make personal stakes work is to make the character care. Show the struggle between what is being asked of the character and your character’s personal code of honor. Is what is being asked in conflict with her moral code? Does it go against a promise made? Will it alter the course of the character forever?
A great example of this is a story where the protagonist is forced to commit a crime to save someone she loves. It is that love that will force her over the line and make her do something that would otherwise be abhorrent to her.
The only way this type of stakes works is if the reader knows your character well enough to understand and empathize with the struggle she faces. This requires intimacy and passion revealed in concrete details. The story should be about the inner struggle to reach her goal or get what she so desperately wants despite the obstacles in her way.
Focus on what moves the protagonist. What makers her afraid? What would prevent her from succeeding? What is she missing, regretting, hoping, dreaming? What is her fatal weakness? What is her greatest need? The answer to those questions is how you will figure out how to move your protagonist through the maze of complications and stakes.
Examples of personal stakes are individual. They must be rooted in your character’s present or past. They could be an abusive backstory or a grave mistake. It could be they witnessed a crime and are on the run. Or maybe they made a deathbed vow and are being asked to act counter to that.
Public Stakes
Public stakes are about the world around the protagonist. It could be a high school, a town, the world or the galaxy. The stakes are universal. They go beyond the protagonist.
The trick to writing public stakes is to go small. You can’t write about the entire galaxy, but you can write about a girl who longs to escape her boring planet and save the world. The story is about the girl. Her story becomes a universal story of wanting to make a difference in the world.
The reason this is different from personal stacks is that the outcome either has a larger impact on the world or that the personal stakes are rooted in a larger concept or idea. It might be that the stakes conflict with a popularly held belief like a belief in the integrity of the law or that the success of the protagonist will have devastating effects on a larger scale, such as the cost of an FBI agent not finding a terrorist cell. The story is about the agent, but the cost of his failure would affect many. In the first example, the story is about an assault on the justice system. A great example of this would be To Kill a Mockingbird by Harper Lee.
Public stakes work because those stories act as a common man/woman story. The protagonist represents society as a whole and the situation she faces taps into an underlying fear in the reader. It’s Jane Smiley’s A Thousand Acres story about family abuse or Toni Morrison’s book Beloved about the lengths we will go for freedom and the cost for that fight.