Stakes
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.
