Stakes in Stories
I’ve said it so many times now that it has practically become a mantra; stories are, generally speaking, driven by conflict. There are stories out there that aren’t, but they are few and far between. Frankly, in my opinion, even fewer in that number are particularly engaging.
That being said though, conflict alone isn’t necessarily enough to keep a story engaging either. Conflict is important, but it is given weight by stakes. As a writer, you need to make sure that your readers aren’t just aware of the conflict as a force pushing the narrative forward, you have to make them believe that it is important in the realm of your story.
Naturally, the first place one’s mind probably jumps to when considering that, is the severity of the stakes. It makes logical sense that the higher the stakes are, the more important they are within the confines of the story. This is definitely one way to increase tension and give weight to the conflict.
That being said though, it isn’t actually as simple as you might think. This comes down to two complications. The first, is simply that people are genre savvy. Most genres, trends, tropes and cliches have existed for hundreds if not thousands of years in some incarnation or another. So your readers are going to know the general gist of how a story is going to play out a lot of the time - maybe even most of the time. In the vast majority of stories, the heroes win in the end. Maybe those victories are not consequence free, but that’s typically how things play out. Furthermore, the worse the fallout if your heroes fail, the less likely it is that they will. Writers might have a reputation for being sadistic, but it’s pretty uncommon for a writer to willingly end their world and therefore pretty much all future story potential it and its characters hold. Readers know all this, so strangely enough, stakes becoming too high on their own can actually reduce the tension.
The second part of this is that human perceptions are naturally inclined to specific scales and timeframes. We aren’t really built to be able to properly comprehend things beyond a certain scale and we tend to be quite shortsighted when it comes to how things impact the world around us. That’s why it’s been so easy for governments and corporations to turn a blind eye to the damage we’ve been doing to our environment and climate in favour of profit in reality. Well, the same does apply to fiction. We aren’t as good at fully grasping stakes like world shattering calamities that affect billions of faceless characters or scenarios which will impact generations. We’re more preoccupied with the narrow bubble of what we know and experience in the present as a general rule.
All of this is why a story about a bake-off or a basketball game can be just as enrapturing as a story about a potential apocalypse - or even more so, depending on the writing. Does that mean then that the solution is to actually create stories with low stakes? Well… no.
If your stakes are too low, then you have a different problem. Admittedly though, it’s a simpler one. If the stakes are very low and the consequences are minor, there isn’t really much reason for your audience to care about the end result. What difference does it really make if the protagonist makes the second best batch of brownies and not the best? What does it matter if the plucky newcomer basketball team loses in the semi-finals? Well, potentially more than you might think at the surface level.
The solution to the problem with stakes isn’t to look for some sweet spot where the stakes are high enough to have real consequences for the world but are low enough to be comprehensible and unpredictable. That can certainly help, but it would greatly limit the stories we can tell and I’m definitely not about to encourage any writing philosophy that does that.
The solution to this little paradox is to give your audience a reason to care. The ideal way to do that is the same whether you’re dealing with an epic fantasy about nations falling, a sci-fi thriller dealing with the potential end of the Earth or that newcomer to the bake-off scene. You make the audience care when the stakes are personal, not just external.
Another thing I have said very often through these articles and blog posts and Stories Across Borders both is that it doesn’t matter how dramatic and intense your plot is if your audience isn’t invested in your characters. I even wrote a whole post about plot vs character-centric writing. Well, when it comes to stakes, I still stand by this philosophy.
If you get your audience invested in your characters, they naturally become invested in what the stakes of the story mean to and for those characters. While the bake-off might mean nothing to the world at large, it might be an incredibly personal thing for the young newcomer who has decided if they can’t win they’ll give up their dreams of opening a bakery and focus on the degree their parents want for them. Especially if the odds are stacked against them. Maybe the bake-off scene is an established thing in the neighbourhood and the old guard play politics to get an edge. Suddenly, that’s a much more dramatic and engaging story. With our asteroid scenario, the crew sent to deflect it and save the Earth have a much more significant job to deal with on a far larger scale. But the audience is going to care a lot more about their success when the crew’s own lives are at risk. Or worse if, by virtue of being in space, they risk being the only survivors and losing all their loved ones. We probably can’t fully comprehend or relate to the stakes of saving the world, but we can definitely relate to not wanting to lose people we care about or be isolated.
If you’ve read my previous posts or listened to any of SAB, nothing I have just said is going to be a revolutionary bit of information for you. Honestly, if you’re a writer of any sort yourself, this is probably something you have been at least intrinsically aware of or accidentally doing anyway. But, I always find it kind of interesting how stories with very high stakes and very low stakes in the grand scheme of things can be similarly engaging. So I wanted to put to words exactly why this is the case. It’s just an added bonus that it gives my own writing philosophy a bit more weight when it’s laid out like this.
