OK it looks like I’m going to do a series of posts on plot. Let’s start with the stakes.
Objectively speaking, the stakes are the thing that is to be lost or gained, depending on how things go. The stakes are crucial; if they don’t matter, the story won’t work. Nearly everybody realizes this; what a lot of writers don’t think about, though, is: Who is the person to whom the stakes matter, and why?
The answer is that the stakes have to matter to a minimum of two people: the main character and the reader. If the reader doesn’t care about the stakes, they’re unlikely to finish the book, or perhaps pick it up at all. If the main character doesn’t care – if he/she has nothing important to them at stake – then they have no real reason for slogging through whatever horrible plot events the writer has dreamed up.
What makes stakes important? Different things for different people – and this is the first stumbling block for many folks. First off, what the writer thinks is important about the story may not be important to the readers, or to the characters. I’ve met several writers who believed sincerely that a particular message or character or plot element was the important one, when their readers and even characters obviously cared much more about something else. The clearest was a writer who thought she’d written a murder mystery, and was astonished when it sold (and quite well) as a Romance novel, because the relationships had always been more important to the characters (and thus more interesting to readers) than the murder.
More common is the situation where what is at stake is, or should be, important to the readers and characters both, but the readers can see that, while the characters don’t know enough to care about it yet. As soon as Gandalf checks the ring for fire-writing and finds the inscription, the reader knows that this is important. It may not be clear yet exactly what is at stake, but we’re sure it’s not anything small. Frodo, however, doesn’t figure this out for quite a while. Oh, he believes it when Gandalf says the ring is important, and even agrees to take it to Rivendell, but then he keeps putting off leaving, because the trip isn’t really important to him. It is only when the Black Riders show up and the Shire he loves looks like being threatened that he really starts moving…because protecting the Shire is what is important to him.
And finally, there’s the case when the characters care passionately about something that is pretty much unimportant to the readers. The events of West Side Story are propelled, initially, by a turf war between rival gangs over a two-block stretch of city street in a rough, run-down section of New York City. The fate of those two blocks does not matter much to me personally, nor to the vast majority of theatergoers, but the story has riveted audiences for decades because the characters do care, passionately. When a set of sympathetic and/or interesting characters care passionately about something, however trivial that something may be in an objective sense, readers are usually willing to let themselves be swept along with them.
There are two other things to remember about what is at stake in a story: first, that there can be a difference between the perceived stakes and the actual stakes in a story, and second that both the perceived and the actual stakes can change over the course of a novel.
The perceived stakes are what the readers and characters think is at stake at any given point in a story. In The Lord of the Rings, the fate of Middle Earth is at stake right from the start, but neither the reader nor the characters know it for certain until the Council of Rivendell, two-thirds of the way through the first book. The perceived stakes, up to that point, are things like the lives of the hobbits, fulfilling Gandalf’s request successfully, and keeping a magic token out of the hands of obvious bad guys. Those are plenty important enough to be going on with.
Similarly, there are thrillers that begin with a seemingly random murder. The perceived goal at that point is catching the murderer; it is only as the story proceeds and new evidence gets uncovered that the characters and the reader realize that the murder was part of a larger plot to rob a bank, which in turn is revealed as a way to finance an even larger plot to bring down the government. The larger plots were there all the time (and probably known to the author), but the perception of readers and characters develops more slowly.
The other track a plot can take is for the actual stakes to change and develop over the course of the story. This generally means that what the character wants or thinks is at risk becomes larger and more important – the hero’s village needs food for their big anniversary feast, so he shoots a deer; shooting the deer means he is arrested for poaching; being arrested and convicted for poaching means he’s given the choice of being hanged or working for a wizard; working for the wizard causes his previously-unknown magic to go haywire and destroy the tower; destroying the tower wakes up the dragon sleeping underneath it, which now threatens the kingdom… What’s at stake goes from the success of a party to the hero’s freedom and perhaps life to the survival of the entire kingdom. Each problem solved results in a new, larger problem with more at stake than before.
When the writer knows that what is really at stake is much larger and more important than what the main character initially thinks is at stake, there is sometimes a tendency not to pay attention to the character’s current perceived stakes, because they are so trivial compared to the ultimate actual stakes. This often results in what, to the reader, looks like a lot of pointless running around for insufficient reasons (because the writer is neglecting what the character wants and needs now, as opposed to what the writer knows the character is going to want and need four or five chapters from now). The writer is so busy setting up things for the eventual revelation of the true stakes that they forget that the characters won’t ever get to that point without a reason.
Alternatively, some writers rush the story to get to the most important problem, dumping everything on the main characters as early as they can manage, in the mistaken belief that this is an effective way of getting the reader and characters involved. “OH NO THE WORLD IS GOING TO END TOMORROW!” is not usually the most effective way of opening a novel, because it’s practically impossible to a) be convincing about it or b) maintain and raise the necessary level of tension over the course of an entire book. It might work for a short story, or for something humorous (especially if the next line is something like “Joe sighed. ‘What, again? That’s the third time this month.’”)
For either sort of writer, it can be useful to ask themselves, “What do these characters think is at stake right now, for them, at this exact point in the story, that makes them willing to take the next step?” It doesn’t have to be a big reason; “what is at stake” can be something as trivial as “satisfying their curiosity,” especially early in a story when there don’t appear to be any dangerous or threatening consequences. But if your characters don’t have a reason to move forward, the reader won’t believe it when they do.
Something I keep bumping into are stakes where the protagonist can’t do anything about them, or doesn’t think he can. Or where the stakes are important, but the effort is so great and the odds so long that the character chooses to not make the effort. Where my protagonist looks at the cards he was dealt, and immediately folds, rather than bidding and playing out the hand.
So I come up with what I think is an interesting character and an interesting set up, and then I discover that my character is an Andromeda: She can’t avoid being chained to the rock and she can’t do anything about the sea monster. She can only sit there and hope to get rescued. Then I have to go back and either (a) gin up some way that Andromeda can do something meaningful and interesting about the stakes of getting eaten by the sea monster, (b) find a different plot where something else is at stake, something that Andromeda can deal with, or (c) write a different story, about the Perseus character, instead.
Lurker, sounds as if you need to rewrite Andromeda. If there’s a chain, a rock, and a sea monster, and no Perseus in sight, she’s got to think of some way of getting *herself* out. Which would probably require rewriting your story from the beginning, but could give you a more powerful character who would drive, and be driven by, her own plot.
(Also, good luck with doing this, but you might try it.)
My current story starts with the hero heading into the outback to track down reported decreases in production of something Critically Important. Shortly before he gets there, somebody else asks him to track down rumors of something else Critically Important being diverted. After a couple days he finds out that the local people are being callously exploited, and by now he’s sort-of figured out what’s the answer (not the solution, but an answer is something) to the first Critically Important thing. Shortly thereafter, he makes the local place too hot to hold him and has to flee to the next place and adopt a new identity.
If I’m getting this right, it looks like an escalation of stakes. Hope so. I do have the distant tail of the boa constrictor in sight; now the problem is getting from here to there.
“Andromeda” here isn’t character in a specific story I have in mind, but an example-name for a problem I keep running into over and over again. Yes, I might rewrite things so she comes up with some way of getting herself out – that was my option (a) in my original comment.
But I’d rather not have the problem in the first place, rather than always running into it and then having to re-write.
Deep Lurker – I feel your pain. I’ve run into this problem several times, unfortunately. For example, I once made my princess character have to defeat a sea monster, without giving her any way of doing so. Took me a long time to figure that one out.
I think stakes are closely connected with pacing in a story. If the stakes are throughout (even if it’s emotional rather than action) then the pacing will clip along. However, if things don’t have stakes, I find myself bored and thinking that things are taking too long.
Try solution A2) Internal battle.
There are LOTS of things in real life that are impossible to “kill” but still happen. Impending Death of a loved one from age or disease is one. Or battle with depression. Or… endless failure at romance. Or endless failure at jobs. Sometimes the story is “happily ever now” instead of “kill the dragon”.
You know… I’ve never really read a story about the princess that got rescued. How does she deal with being helpless? Is Perseus really a better deal then the Sea Monster? Does Perseus even LIKE her? Or just felt sorry for her? (Or just thought she was hot)
Love your ideas, Esther.
I unexpectedly found a way to up the stakes in my WIP during this afternoon’s writing session. I knew the heroine’s biggest problem at the moment was to get the rest of her fighting troop to accept (or at least be reasonably civil to) the two fighters from a former enemy country who are spending a year with them. Now it turns out that in a month her troop is going to have to guard the visiting delegation from said country – something most of them are not going to be at all happy about – so she has a much shorter time than she thought to bring them around.
Another reason not to tell us the world is in danger immediately is that it’s not convincing. You haven’t had a chance to build it yet. It’s just cardboard. Put it in danger, and the effect is not high stakes but low ones because it’s a cheap stage-setting.
I commented on the last post about how The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe, which I am currently reading (started last book yesterday), feels like it has no plot to me. Interestingly, after reading this post it occurs to me that another thing I don’t like much about the books is that there are no stakes, at least at this point. The books are narrated in first person and pretty early on in the first book it’s made clear that the narrator is writing the story of his journey having attained a position of power. The story is entirely focused on the narrator and the things that happen to him but you already know that he is never in any real danger from anything he relates because he’s writing it from the future. Now, there are greater things at stake in this universe that depend on the narrator, but never at any point in the 3/4 books I’ve read so far is this made even remotely clear. (I only know because my husband told me.) Thus it feels very much as if there are no stakes in this story at all.
And yet, these are some of the most highly praised books and Gene Wolfe is one of the most highly acclaimed authors in science fiction. It just goes to show, nothing is absolute.
Since you are going to be doing a series of blog posts on plot… might I beg one on what to do when your character *doesn’t* have a real reason for doing anything? In my current WIP, it is definitely a character-and-emotion-centric story, but my MC is an average teenage girl going through life on a week in winter vacation. She has no emotional impetus for doing basically anything of the things she is doing, so I’m just trying to show through her interactions w/ family that she really does have problems and that there really is A Plot Going on Somewhere. (Because my MC doesn’t exactly realize it.)
A life scheduled around and dictated by school and everyone else often feels like people don’t have a reason for doing what they’re doing, aside from laws about truancy and some vague notion of college and jobs, so I know that my problem isn’t an unrealistic setting, but I’m not sure if I should try to exploit this (add this onto my MC’s emotional plate) or circumvent it with decisive action. So, really, any general advice on vague motivations would be very much appreciated! 🙂
That sounds like a bildungsroman. Which are trickier to plot. But the important thing is to remember that what unites the tale is that its events are part of the character’s growing maturity.
This produces a looser weave than a driving purpose, but careful reading of such works shows that they often are a lot more connected than it looks at first glance.
Thank you! I hadn’t thought of that, but that’s exactly what my story is! Now I need to figure out how to make it more cohesive… and finish said story. 🙂
Even after they have come up with some high stakes and made the reader care about the outcome, one critical question the writer needs to ask (and satisfyingly answer) is “What binds the protagonist to the conflict?” Why doesn’t he just walk away and let George do it? Motivation to persevere has to feel genuine, or the whole story falls flat.
When it is well done, a character trying to give up the fight but being forced back into it can make a good read–but most of the times I’ve seen this attempted (usually in a YA book or movie), it came across as artificial.