Raising the Stakes

Suppose your character is running late. If she’s late to class, or late to her sister’s wedding, or late to see her mother on her deathbed, the stakes are different.  Suppose she needs to exit a room.  It makes a difference if she can simply walk out, or the door is locked, or the room is on fire.  Next suppose she needs to get out of a burning, locked room in time to save her mother from dying.  We’ve just raised the stakes.

Locked in.

In the poker analogy, there’s more money in the bet, more at risk, more to lose when a player raises the stakes.  The game matters more, so the gambler or the reader cares more, too.  In the best stories, we’re playing for keeps.

Of course, we can’t have houses on fire all the way through our novels, and too many fires or chase scenes can make a book feel contrived.  The escalation of trouble needs to be grounded in reality, but inevitable, like the on-going train wreck in Of Mice and Men, which seems like a simple story about friends while underneath (spoilers ahead) the violence keeps building: dead mouse, euthanized pet dog, mutilated hand, murdered puppy, murdered woman, murdered friend.

It’s easy to see it in retrospect, as a reader, but how do you raise the stakes as a writer?

It’s not a simple matter, even when we already grasp that conflict is the key.  A mistake that’s easy to make is creating characters who get very worked up over something small, a thing with no other emotional weight around it.  A man and a woman arguing about tearing down or preserving an old windmill, for instance, might seem promising because of the culture and history involved, but already I’m thinking, who cares?  I’m already expecting the characters will seem sort of silly or quaint or unreasonably stubborn when they get all worked up (which, incidentally, can work quite well in comedy).  If a writer is told at this point, “raise the stakes,” someone can bring in a bulldozer, but it still won’t have much power to engage me.

On the other hand, if a man and a woman are arguing instead about the custody of their son, I’m already anxious.  It matters.  If the father agrees to pierce his son’s ear when the mother has told the boy no piercings are allowed, that’s a conflict with emotional promise.  The thing—the ear lobe—is small, but the relationships around it are deep.  If now it turns out the old windmill is the home of the boy’s mother, who is a deaf artist and makes her living selling her paintings there, now I care about the windmill, too.  Try a bulldozer now, on top of the pierced ear, and the stakes—the risk for loss and vindictive pain—are much higher.

If we start with a conflict that has sincere emotional consequences and turn the characters loose, it’s likely the stakes will rise automatically and naturally.  You can think about it in simple terms of escalation, (Who has eaten my porridge?  Who has broken my chair?  Who is sleeping in my bed!) but it’s the betrayal or loss or outrage that will give the story resonance.  For that, someone has to be at risk, in different emotional ways, in scene after scene.  The potential for hurt can be subtle, as when a character is misunderstood or isolated, but it needs to be there.

If you’re a seat-of-the-pantser like I am, and you aren’t working with an outline of the story arc all planned, it helps to feel in each scene, while writing it, that things are purely getting worse.  Surprise: the patient father gets violent when his authority is thwarted.  Surprise: the boy who seems ready to skip school won’t go with his friend.  Raising the stakes is not just a plot device; it allows the characters to become more complex and interesting.  We see what they’re like under pressure, and we learn even more when we make our characters exert pressure on each other.

If you’re trouble-shooting a scene and you think you need to raise the stakes, make sure first that your characters are in a problem that really matters.  Delete any paragraph that’s just sitting there not advancing the action.  Make a character do and say things that will make the situation worse, especially if she means well.  Lock the door so she has to sneak out a window.  Add rain so she’s miserably wet and cold.  When she thinks she can’t be a midwife anymore, confront her with a woman in labor.  Give her scars that matter.