High-stakes Fiction: Making Your Reader Care
There are no absolutes in writing and editing, no rules that don’t have copious exceptions.
But I’ll risk making an uncharacteristic absolute statement: If readers aren’t connecting with your story, or you aren’t getting agent or publisher response, chances are it’s because your stakes aren’t high enough.
Break every other rule of storytelling — some of the most extraordinary and original stories smash storytelling convention — but fail to create high stakes and readers will stop turning the pages (or never get hooked in the first place).
By high stakes, I don’t mean someone must die, or a character must lose everything, or the world must be in danger of ending. While those are objectively high-stakes events, by themselves that’s not what pulls a reader in and makes her care about a story.
Even in the-world-is-ending stories, in the ones where we are really invested it’s because the author has invested us deeply in the specific and intensely personal story of his or her protagonist(s).
Although of course we want the world to be saved, it’s Will Smith we’re really rooting for in the original Independence Day (and also in I Am Legend…and in I, Robot — basically if a disaster is coming, you want Will Smith on your side…). We care about his character and his personal stakes, and that becomes the vehicle we ride into the story on, the close-angle lens that focuses the bigger picture of saving the world.
So how does that apply to women’s fiction, where the future of the world is rarely at stake, there’s not much call for heavy artillery, and stories are often much more intimate?
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When I use the word “stakes” I mean more than what is literally at risk for a character. I mean it in a broader context: how important something is, how much the character (and thus the reader) cares — a personal interest or involvement, and the more personal and involved, the better.
If you want your reader to invest, the character must want or be in danger of losing something he or she cares enormously about.
Some of the most affecting stories are about seemingly minute events: In Julia Claiborne Johnson’s powerful Be Frank with Me, what’s at stake to the protagonist is simply a very unusual boy’s happiness. In the movie Up — an animated children’s story — the external stakes involve an old man getting his house onto a particular cliff. In the film Lars and Real Girl (I often recommend analyzing films, as easily digestible two-hour crystallizations of story structure), it’s just one lonely man’s love life.
These are gross simplifications of each story, and the stakes evolve and rise as each one develops. But why do we invest deeply in these stories despite the modest scale of their stakes?
In each case, it’s because the character profoundly cares about what is at stake. And the author (or filmmaker) has made us profoundly care about those characters.
Stakes are a highly specific element of story that’s tightly interconnected with every other element. It’s the fulcrum on which everything else balances.
Stakes are directly tied to character, because we can’t care about someone who isn’t real to us, to whom we can’t relate, with whom we feel no sympathy or empathy. So building three-dimensional, fully realized characters is essential to creating high stakes that will deeply invest readers.
But so is a well-crafted plot — exquisitely drawn characters who are simply living out their daily lives with no obstacles or challenges or goals they are pursuing lie flat on the page: they want nothing, they do nothing, and so nothing at all rides on the outcome of their lives — there is nothing at stake.
Stakes are also closely tied to motivation and goal — the more a character wants (is motivated by) the goal (what he or she wants), the higher the stakes. They are closely tied to conflict, tension, and suspense, all of which amp up stakes (and vice versa). They are tied to point of view (lack of strong voice or identification lowers stakes), to pace (leisurely pace often equals low stakes), and even to your prose itself (a single mother showing up with her baby on the doorstep of the father saying, “I can’t do this” is different from one saying “I can’t do this alone”).
And yet so often I see authors make low-stakes choices: “She’s leaving her husband because she doesn’t love him anymore.”
When I was an actor (another lifetime ago), the best piece of acting advice I ever got was that what separates great actors from good ones is that great actors always make the strongest possible choices.
How much more powerful might your story be if your protag leaves her husband not because she doesn’t love him anymore, but despite the fact that she desperately does? So rather than the relatively low stakes of a character walking away from something she feels fairly ambivalent about, we see strong conflicting desires — what master editor Sol Stein calls a crucible, one of the most powerful elements of compelling fiction.
In every situation, however big or small, the stronger a character’s motivations, desires, and choices, the more engaging, dramatic, and compelling the scene. Readers feel what your characters feel. Give them the strongest emotions you can — the highest stakes possible, the greatest tension, the biggest conflicts, the deepest hole you can throw your characters in and then make them claw their way out of. Whenever you have a chance to make things stickier or clean them up, go for sticky. Don’t take the easy way out — force your character to face the most complicated path instead. That’s what makes for a book we can’t put down.
Don’t think in terms of adding more exciting stuff. Think in terms of adding more meaning.
Here are a handful of specific suggestions for raising stakes in your own stories, with examples of novels that incorporate each one.
1. Add layers and resonance by creating both internal and external stakes.
What a character wants or fears losing can be both external (Harry Potter wants to go to Hogwarts) or internal (Harry craves love and family). For the strongest punch and maximum stakes, great authors incorporate both.
Camille Pagan: Life and Other Near-Death Experiences — Libby is diagnosed with an inoperable brain tumor the same day her husband drops a bomb on their marriage. She fights for happiness despite both her fear of experiencing another heartbreak (internal) and certain looming loss (external).
2. Paint in shades of gray.
Black-and-white heroes (and villains) are dull for readers and seem inhuman — none of us are all good or all bad, but a fascinating mix of both. It raises the stakes enormously to create shades of gray — it gives us much more to root for, empathize with, relate to. A hero who might regress into alcoholism, for instance, instantly raises the story’s stakes. A villain who might show signs of potential redemption also heightens stakes. Both these situations raise reader investment and involvement — now we are rooting for (or against) these characters in very tenuous circumstances, which creates tension and suspense…which raises stakes.
Emily Giffin’s Something Borrowed and Something Blue — Both books are wonderful studies in shades of gray for protagonists/antagonists: good-girl Rachel steals her best friend’s fiancé, and vain, self-absorbed Darcy reveals a core of goodness and heart.
3. Add conflicting desires/goals.
Is it stronger if a reporter is sleeping with a source solely to fish for information, or if she also develops sincere, deep feelings for him? Perhaps she desperately wants a scoop, a groundbreaking story. Pit that against something else she wants equally desperately — perhaps someone who really loves her. She can’t have both things in this situation — and that’s a crucible, and that’s where great fiction resides.
Jojo Moyes, Me Before You — This story is filled with conflicting goals between its two protags, as well as within them. Louisa desperately needs the job caring for Will, yet Will desperately wants to die. Louisa isn’t really living her life or taking control, yet she meets a man who fiercely wants to, but can’t. Will wants to give up on life, feeling it has nothing to offer him if he can’t live it as large as he used to — till he meets a woman determined to show him what’s worth seizing in his everyday life even as it is.
4. Add meaning and layers, and continue to up the ante as the story develops.
Stakes must be real and significant from the outset — but they should continue to evolve and heighten throughout the story. If a man kills his wife and her lover, is it stronger if he does it out of wounded pride and anger, or also a desperate, painful unreturned love for her? And what if he then learns that the man he killed was never actually her lover? And that his wife never stopped loving her husband? Or that she was pregnant? Create more investment in readers by continually layering in more meaning and impact for characters.
Again to cite Me Before You: The stakes are already high at the outset, but they are raised even further when Louisa and Will fall in love, and each of their goals takes on much more impact and gray area. Plus there’s a time limit — a ticking clock, another great way to raise stakes.
5. Be intensely personal, and intensely specific…
Most of us have read stories or seen movies where a murder or tragedy happens at the very beginning — yet we’re left unmoved. Why? Because readers don’t care what’s happening until we care whom it’s happening to. We root for even small, personal stakes when a character we are invested in cares enormously about this deeply personal, highly specific thing (have I hammered that home enough…?). Even if the protag is sublimating or denying what she wants, the reader must see it.
Graeme Simsion, The Rosie Project — Simsion’s protagonist is a highly specific character: a scientist with Asperger’s who wants to find a wife.
6. …But also be universal.
Yet this highly personal and specific thing should resonate with readers on a universal, relatable, empathetic level. (Sympathy isn’t enough — you must tap into the reader’s own feelings with those of the character.)
Whether we have Asperger’s or not, whether we are scientists or not, whether we even want to be married or not, most people can relate to loneliness and the craving to be loved for who we are. The universality of that is what gives The Rosie Project such wide appeal.
7. Embrace uncertainty.
Uncertainty raises stakes. Create story questions and don’t immediately resolve them. If all our questions and uncertainties are immediately addressed, or readers can easily predict the protag’s path, stakes (and reader involvement) are low.
Taylor Jenkins Reid: One True Loves — On the verge of remarrying after coping with the heartbreak of losing her beloved husband, Emma learns he’s still alive. Reid could have made the protagonist’s husband or her fiancé her protag’s clear choice, but she doesn’t — it’s Emma’s complicated feelings for both men and her difficulty determining the right path forward that raises stakes, and make readers compulsively flip pages to find out which man she chooses.
8. Be immediate and visceral.
Regardless of how high the stakes you’ve created, if we aren’t “seeing” your characters’ interactions, actions, reactions, and inner life, the stakes feel low. It’s like watching a slide show of someone’s adventure vacation while they dryly narrate their exciting events, versus being on that zip line with them as they sail across the mouth of a volcano. Don’t leave your reader on the outside looking in, or hearing about the “meat” of a story that happened “offstage” or in the past. Put us right there, deeply inside your protag’s head as she or he lives through the excruciating, exhilarating, affecting key moments of the story.
Amanda Prowse, pretty much anything she’s written — Prowse is a master of immediate, visceral scenes that plant the reader directly in the middle of what’s happening. In her stories of everyday lives and relationships, her characters’ hopes, disappointments, triumphs, agonies, etc., are felt firsthand in scenes that unfold before us — scenes we are a part of through the strong POV of her main characters as we live each painful moment along with them.
Exercise: Identifying and raising stakes
Using your WIP (or another project, or a novel of your choosing), in one sentence (two at most) clarify the stakes for the protag(s) by answering these questions:
§ What does the protagonist want?
§ What does he/she stand to gain by attaining it?
§ What are the consequences if he/she fails to attain her goal? (Note: Your protag’s goal will likely change from the beginning of the story; use the main overarching story goal)
Now, using the above suggestions, list at least three ways you can raise the stakes even higher. Even just as an exercise, try raising the stakes to the point of melodrama. Sometimes it can shake an idea loose, and offer a glimpse into ways you could organically raise stakes higher and draw your reader in more deeply.
In her 25+ years in the publishing industry, developmental editor Tiffany Yates Martin of Foxprint Editorial has been privileged to help hundreds of authors, from New York Times, USA Today, and Wall Street Journal bestsellers to up-and-coming authors, tell their stories as truthfully, compellingly, and effectively as possible. She’s led workshops and seminars for conferences and writers’ groups across the country and is a frequent contributor to writers’ sites and publications.
