Has anyone ever told you that your story is falling flat and you need to raise the stakes? What they mean is you need more escalation in your plot, but not in the way most would think. Last week we discussed how to put stakes into your novel, and this week I want to focus on what “raising the stakes” really means for writers.
Raising The Stakes
When someone talks about raising the stakes in a book, they want escalation. They are looking for gradually bigger risks. I think the phrase is borrowed from gamblers. When playing poker, you can decide to raise the stakes. Nothing about the game changes, you just attach bigger potential consequences to the outcome.
However, you can’t just escalate the stakes in a novel for no reason. If your protagonist has to get to a specific place on time to keep her job, you can’t just state a few chapters later that she has to get there to save her sister. Those are two very different stakes. However, what can happen is the protagonist realizes halfway to the spot that she doesn’t want to work for the bad guys anymore. But, then the bad guys take her sister to make her finish the task. The stakes have raised from job loss to her sister’s death, but it wasn’t the stakes that you adjusted—it was the antagonistic force (the person or obstacles working against your protagonist). You put in a new obstacle (the sister’s capture) and increased the antagonist’s power (the sister’s life as leverage). Because of that change, the stakes are inadvertently raised to match the new, stronger antagonistic force that the protagonist faces.
The next time someone tells you to raise the stakes in your story, don’t just change your stakes. Add new obstacles or give the antagonist a bigger advantage that will cause the protagonist’s stakes to change and escalate as a result.
How To Increase The Antagonistic Force
Now that we know what has to happen to raise the stakes, let’s look at how you can increase the antagonistic force working against your protagonist. This is done by broadening and deepening the conflict in the story. Broadening a conflict means you make it affect more people and escalate the potential consequence’s external impact. Deepening a conflict means it affects the protagonist in a more personal way, escalating the internal impact of the potential consequences. Basically, you want to have a snowball effect where one small thing keeps growing until it’s a giant snowball.
One way to look at this is through the phrase “for the want of a nail.” It’s the idea that if you overlook a small detail, it could be the undoing of something major. The full quote goes like this:
“For the want of a nail the shoe was lost,
For the want of a shoe the horse was lost,
For the want of a horse the rider was lost,
For the want of a rider the battle was lost,
For the want of a battle the kingdom was lost,
And all for the want of a horseshoe-nail.”
We can take this message to heart as writers and look for ways to make this happen in our stories (though happy endings will resolve the issue before the kingdom is lost). A lost nail affects a horseshoe, the horse, the rider, a battle, and then a whole kingdom. What obstacle can you put in your protagonist’s way that can snowball into a major issue at the end? What weakness can you give her that will spiral out of control? Look at your starting antagonistic force and find ways to broaden and deepen it so the potential consequences also get bigger.
Practical Ways To “Raise The Stakes”
Knowing that you need to broaden and deepen a conflict to raise the stakes, let’s look at specific questions you can ask. These questions will help you think of ways to give the antagonistic force more power and make the protagonist’s life harder.
- How can you take away someone who the protagonist relies on the most?
- What advantage can you take away from the protagonist?
- How can you make your protagonist build up to finally facing her biggest fear?
- How can you cut the time the protagonist has to complete her goal?
- What belief does the protagonist hold dear that you can shake or undermine?
- How can you threaten the person the protagonist loves most?
- What extra advantage can you give the antagonist?
This is not an all-inclusive list, but hopefully it gets you thinking about how you can escalate the challenges the protagonist faces while trying to achieve her goal. Once you escalate the antagonistic force, the stakes will rise with it. The potential consequences will become more personally impactful and farther reaching to affect more people’s lives. The deeper and broader the stakes, the greater the risks will feel to the readers.
Final Thoughts
Sometimes when it comes to understanding a common phrase, you can’t always take it as face value. Raising the stakes is one of those pieces of advice where you have to read between the lines. Yes, they want the stakes to escalate in your story, but what you have to do as a writer is escalate the antagonistic force opposing the protagonist. Once that happens, the stakes will follow suit, and your readers will feel the increased sense of urgency in the book.
Thanks for reading!
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