This week I’ve come back to the topics suggested in Book Club with Spikes, to follow on from the small stories post a couple of weeks back. I have a great list, and people keep adding topic ideas, thank you! I didn’t jot down who suggested which topic, sorry guys.
There are likely as many ways to escalate the tension in a story as there are stories. I never want to say ‘this is the way, and only this is the way’ because the delightful thing about human imagination is that it’s limitless. That being said, there are ways that will work better than others.
Sometimes, this is because raising the stakes has been overdone. I think we’re all familiar with the trope of a family killed, leaving only one survivor for vengeance…. and even that, I’m not going to say you shouldn’t do. I’ve done it, with my story about Soleh (collected in Crow Moon) who survived the slaughter of her extended family, was taken into slavery, married, and only when her own children died did the flame of revenge leap up in her heart. That’s where the story starts. I think it’s going to depend on how and where you approach the story and the character. I took a woman who had been broken as a child, regained strength into adulthood, and at the peak of her physical abilities, then and only then snapped her mind into the possibility of avenging what had been done.
The small stories I talked about in the other post are often plights that can be overcome, and if the problem doesn’t work out, the ripples ebb away in life, and eventually calm returns. When you raise the stakes in a story, you amplify those ripples into waves, and if you want the level of drama, all the way into a tsunami. Plots can be roller coasters, all ups-and-downs, and a tsunami plot would be: normal day at the beach, why is the ocean running away from me?, and then terror and destruction. Personally, I’d wind up that plot with the main characters finding themselves again, safe if not sound. That’s just me, I prefer a happy or at least the potential-to-be-happy ending both in my reading and writing.
Some of this depends on your character. A brittle character is probably not the best choice with a plot escalation that involves them having made a terrible mistake that makes everything worse. This is a great place to have character growth happen, but make sure the character is still redeemable to the readers. If the readers can’t forgive, they will either abandon the story, or leave with a bad taste in their mouth that can have them avoiding your work ever after. Even if the character struggles to forgive themselves, give the readers reason to trust that the character can come back from this error in their ways.
The mirror of this would be to have a character learn that they thought they had made a mistake with tragic consequences, only to discover that they had not in fact screwed up. This is an interesting way to raise the stakes in a plot. Avoid bitterness and resentment being too much on stage, however, because the reader doesn’t engage well with a self-pitying character. I started reading a story the other day and put it down again because the character’s outlook on life was so bleak and cynical I just didn’t care what became of her.
Which is in the author’s best interest to start the story in a way that engages the readers with the characters, so the reader is caring about what happens to them, and is invested in seeing them succeed as the water is sucked back out and while the characters are confused, the reader is flipping pages with bated breath waiting to see how they cope when their world falls in on them. Even starting a story in media res can still have this moment of connection between the reader and the fiction. Hook in the reader, and then you can start raising the stakes. If you start at the ultimate height of peril, there’s nowhere to go but down.
As a pantser, I don’t always know where I’m going with the plot when I start writing. This can make planning escalation of stakes a bit challenging. Still, I think it’s quite possible if you look at the logical next steps. If a character is in danger, what could make it worse? Lost in the woods, and it starts to rain (side note: cold rain is worse than dry snow. Trust my multiple-hypothermic-events self on this one…)? Adrift in space and the beacon is picked up… by aliens! Charging into battle and thrown off his horse? There are ways to make things worse, always. Before you commit to one, though, spend some time thinking about what the path forward will look like. Multiple crises, piling up, before resolution? Or have you already written so many catastrophes in that the character seems to be a chaos magnet, and it’s time to explain to the poor reader what is going on? Will raising this stake, in this way, leave a way out for the character which won’t break him, or the plot?
This can, by the way, be done even with small stories. A friend is dealing with this in her life right now. One of her dogs brought her a tiny, bedraggled kitten. Which is, by itself, a stake! The kitten now must be taught to drink milk from a bottle – a raised stake. What will happen next? This tiny bit of fuzz has a pitbull guardian, I have a feeling life will hold adventures.
What are good stories with raising stakes that you enjoy reading?
Mad Genius Club 
8 responses to “Raising the Stakes”
A lot of Crime Fiction involves escalation when a previously law abiding citizen commits what they think will be their first and only crime and then needing a second to cover up the first, and then a third, and so on. Several of Donald Westlake’s novels follow this pattern–Two Much, A Travesty, and Killing Time come to mind. Often this kind of escalation comes to a crisis point where the main character is faced with a choice between either surrendering to the forces of law and order and facing judgement or crossing a line that will cut her or him off from the old life entirely.
I think of those plots as a narrowing gyre, sucking the character ever deeper, and there is only way to survive. In “comic” crime books, the protag flees upward into some sort of (however modest) redemption. In “tragic” ones… time for the drowned rat and the reader’s head nod.
The Warbots series. It followed the main character’s professional and personal growth through the Army, and looked at how military technology worked (and didn’t. Think BOLO Version 0.5.) Problems that the character dealt with grew from very local to more regional to “potential international crisis,” but in a gradual, in-world believable way.
Remember to not raise them so high as to be unreal. Putting the world in peril, for instance.
But… but what if the world was already in peril when the book started?? 😉
(Looks suspiciously at plot of books 3 & 4)
Actually one positive value of a series is that you have time to build the world so it seems real and convincing before it is threatened. Otherwise the problem is that being so easily threatened makes it flimsy.
Never announce the world is in danger before halfway through the first volume (even it’s the only volume).
It’s kinda nice to have a world that’s already in danger (but either in equilibrium, or everyone knows about it) when the story starts, because it means that you don’t have to spend as much time arguing with people to do certain kinds of things. People know there’s a war on, or whatever the problem is.
But you can always make the problem bigger, or have it turn out that something else was going on.
As long as you can convince me that the world is real and solid enough to care about.