Writers: Get Clear on What’s at Stake
A story isn’t a story without stakes, so get clear on what your characters want.
A story isn’t a story without stakes — without real consequences affecting the life and livelihood of the protagonist. Michelle Barker, Senior Editor at The Darling Axe, describes the phenomenon this way:
When an editor mentions stakes in their feedback on your novel, it’s a polite way of saying, who cares? The answer of course is that the reader should care about what’s happening in your story. If you want them to keep reading, they must care. Your job as the author is to make them care. It’s probably the most important task you have.
So how do you, as an author, make them care? You do this, Barker explains…
By raising the stakes for your protagonist. What happens to them has to matter. It has to make a difference in their life. There must be consequences — significant ones — if they fail to get what they’re after. They must stand to lose something important.
When I was studying for my MFA years ago, I had a writing teacher — a very good one — who addressed this same topic. In doing so, that teacher, the author Fred G. Leebron, shared one of those bits of insight that you note down and reference repeatedly as you go through your writing life. He gave us a list of nine possible “wants” that can drive a story — things that will be at stake for your characters, and particularly your protagonist.
As with any purportedly authoritative resource, I questioned this one immediately. Is there anything else? Are there things here that duplicate one another? In this case, I found no answers, so I thought I’d expand on each of these possible “wants” and give examples from the canon to illustrate how they work.
Birth
Daughter’s Keeper by Ayelet Waldman
In Waldman’s 2003 novel, sex, family, and liberty are all at stake for the two central characters, Juliet Applebaum and her daughter Olivia, but birth is the consequence that builds the story to its crescendo. Juliet, relieved to have raised Olivia and entered a comfortable middle age, is thrust back into parenting when Olivia first gets involved in the crimes of her live-in boyfriend, and then discovers she’s carrying the boyfriend’s baby. The choice of whether or not to keep the baby is the main driver of tension in the story. Along with the painful prospect of incarceration for Olivia and the daily grind of a lifetime struggle between mother and daughter, the impending birth creates a dramatic trial that keeps the pages turning to the end.
Sex
Love and War in California by Oakley Hall
This 2007 novel, Hall’s final work before his death in 2008, is the semi-autobiographical account of protagonist Payton Daltrey’s life journey from San Diego State College student to minor literary luminary in the final years of his life. From the beginning of the story, which starts in 1941, Payton’s infatuation with his fellow student Barbara (Bonny) Bonington is central to the narrative. It’s a sweeping and complex narrative, encompassing war, politics, racism, love and marriage, and the life of the writer, but the thread that runs through it all is sex: Payton’s desperation to find it in his early years, his struggle to come to grips with it when he does, and all of it colored by his lifelong obsession with Bonny. As one would expect from the hand of a skilled and prolific writer like Hall, all of this serves the story’s surprise ending, which is delicious and satisfying.
Death
The Nickel Boys by Colson Whitehead
Readers of Whitehead’s 2019 Pulitzer-Prize-winning novel might immediately conclude that liberty, and not death, is what is most at stake in this story of a notorious “reformatory school” (nee, prison) in early-1960s Florida. To my reading, though, the specter of death hovers over the characters with overwhelming menace from the novel’s earliest pages, and it is the threat of that consequence — and not their imprisonment — that dictates their every move. In fact, the story begins well after the story present, with the discovery of a graveyard on the former grounds of the Nickel Academy reformatory. The story then takes us back to the unjust arrest of an upstanding and innocent Black boy, Elwood Curtis, who is sent to the Nickel Academy. Inside the reformatory gates, Elwood befriends the street-smart Turner, and the two of them set about navigating their fraught and dangerous incarceration, at all times determined to avoid being sent “out back,” to the building from which their fellow detainees never seem to return. What ensues, in Whitehead’s telling, is not only the real murder of children, but the attempted murder of promise, of youthful achievement, and of hope in the lives of the novel’s central characters. And sadly, the attempt is often successful.
Friendship
The Memoirs of Stockholm Sven by Nathaniel Ian Miller
Miller’s debut novel, published in 2021, follows the lengthy saga of Sven Ormson, who resolves to flee his home in Stockholm for the grand vistas and adventure of the far north. Working as a miner in the Arctic archipelago of Svalbard in 1917, Sven is involved in a mining accident that leaves his face horribly disfigured. He then resolves to move even further north to an uninhabited fjord in the northwest, and to live his life alone as a trapper on the frontier. In time, a story of survival becomes a story of friendship as Sven meets and is coached by a Finnish fur trapper, acquires a loyal dog for company, and befriends a Scottish geologist who shares his love of books. As Sven maintains contact through letters with his sister Olga in Stockholm, a surprising second wave of cast-offs arrives, and his monastic life bears fruits of friendship he never could have imagined.
Family
Lucy by the Sea by Elizabeth Strout
In this 2022 novel, the third featuring the protagonist Lucy Barton, Pulitzer-Prize winner Strout continues her exploration of family, an aspect of life known for both searing trials and soaring triumphs. This is also Strout’s pandemic novel: it follows Lucy as her ex-husband William — a scientist and the subject of the second Lucy Barton novel, Oh, William — insists that she flee New York with him immediately for the relative safety of semi-rural Crosby, Maine. Once safely ensconced in a house owned by a friend, Bob Burgess (co-protagonist of Strout’s novel, The Burgess Boys), Lucy ponders her own family. She considers her relationships with her two daughters while worrying about them terribly, and, in fact, her daughter Chrissy suffers a terrible tragedy. Seeing the impoverished side of Crosby, she calls up memories of her abusive parents and her early life of poverty, and talks on the phone with her brother, Pete, and her sister, Vicky, dredging up more painful and awkward memories. And she sees William, an authoritative presence in the crisis who is driven by concern for Lucy and their daughters, in an entirely new light. With the pandemic having reduced life — as it did for many of us — to one of worry and contemplation, the actions of Lucy and others in this story are invariably driven by family, a thread that runs through all of Strout’s books.
Money
The over-arching driver of tension in this 1956 novel by Nobel Laureate Bellow is the threat of financial ruin. The book gives us a day in the life of protagonist Tommy Wilhelm, a fortysomething salesman who has just lost his job and separated from his wife, and out of desperation has dumped his entire life savings into a sketchy commodities investment. Wilhelm’s backstory, which includes a failed attempt at a Hollywood acting career, an increasingly cold relationship with his wealthy father, and a dysfunctional engagement with a psychiatrist who superficially fills Tommy’s many emotional voids, builds a rising tide of drama in the story. But all that drama is intensified, and the story is driven to its sad conclusion, by the impending failure of those commodity investments in the hands of that very same duplicitous psychiatrist, Dr. Tamkin. Failure leads to more failure in this compact, searing tale of financial ruin amid the general prosperity of 1950s America.
Identity
In Chaon’s near-future, semi-dystopian 2022 novel, an unnamed protagonist struggles mightily to hold onto some semblance of a distinct identity. Fittingly, the 50-year-old does not reveal his name, but refers to himself as the “Barely Blur” as he travels the country doing minor paid services for a shadowy network of criminals. He is off the grid, living out of a camper he calls the Guiding Star, and keeping himself pleasantly micro-dosed on drugs. The plot of the story is driven by calls he receives on burner phones the numbers of which should not be known by anyone. The calls are from a mysterious character called Cammie who claims he is her biological father from a series of sperm donations he made as a twentysomething, and that those sperm donations have, she believes, produced 167 other children. The element of identity implicit in this plot driver is also implicit in many of the story’s plot twists: In backstory, we learn that the Barely Blur was taught about living off the grid by an emotionally distant mother, who he eventually killed. A criminal associate of the Barely Blur, Experanza, is a childhood friend, something like a sister, who claims that she was assigned by the criminal network to be his guardian from their early years. And Cammie eventually explains to him that there is a cult that has created an army of large, strong, docile men — not coincidentally, similar to the Barely Blur — that will do their bidding as they disembody from human form. Stories that challenge our thinking about identity are inherently complex, but Chaon is a master of this particular corner of the craft.
Spirituality
This 2006 novel, one of Updike’s last, was his belated response to the events of 9/11/2001. The story brings together a Muslim-American teen, Ahmad Ashmawy Mulloy, and his Jewish-American high school guidance counselor, Jack Levy, at a time when Ahmad is embracing a radical interpretation of Islam that will eventually lead him to participate in a terrorist plot. Concerned about Ahmad’s career intentions, Levy, a secular Jew, reaches out to Ahmad’s Irish-American mother, Teresa, a secular Catholic, and the two fall into a relationship that they conceal from Ahmad. Nonetheless, Ahmad has long seen his mother’s behavior as promiscuous, which drives him deeper into his radically conservative interpretation of Islam. Updike clearly avoids falling into stereotype as he develops these characters. Ahmad does not fall under the sway of a radical cleric or a YouTube rathole — in fact, his imam, Shaikh Rashid, interprets the Prophet’s teachings figuratively. Instead, he self-radicalizes, adopting extremism as a reaction to what he observes around him. And Jake and Teresa do not promote or even represent their spiritual traditions, Judaism and Christianity, but in fact ignore them entirely. Nonetheless, spirituality, whether observed as religion or entirely ignored by the characters, is ever-present in the story, and certainly drives the most potent character arc in the book, which is Ahmad’s descent into radicalism.
Liberty
The Flight Portfolio by Julie Orringer
Orringer’s 2019 novel, her second, is a fictionalized account of the real-life exploits of Varian Fry, a Harvard-educated journalist and editor and the founder and director of the Emergency Rescue Committee. In the early years of World War II, Fry and his associates formed the committee to smuggle writers, poets, painters, filmmakers, and other artists — particularly those of Jewish descent — out of Nazi-occupied territory in France and beyond. From its offices in Marseille, Rescue Committee staff identified and located artists in Nazi territory, forged passports and documents, plotted escape routes via land and sea into Spain, and executed daring operations to usher their clients to safety. In many instances, Fry is at risk of capture, a consequence made all the more dramatic by the fact that he is gay and is not only exchanging letters with a lover in America, but is also liaising with another in France, Elliot Grant. The desire for liberty provides the narrative thrust for the whole of this sweeping, ambitious novel. The real Varian Fry devoted a good portion of his life to liberating the great artists of Europe from Nazi oppression, while the fictional Varian Fry of Orringer’s novel had his own struggle for liberation from the oppressive mores or his time.
What’s at Stake for the Author?
So, what you need as an author is to figure out what’s at stake for your characters. It’s a critical first step to understanding your characters’ motivations, and thereby writing a story readers will care about.
Remember:
- Your characters are interesting people, and interesting people aren’t motivated by just one thing. As you can see in the examples above, there are always many things at stake in the course of an interesting life, but you should identify one thing that is the driving force for the particular protagonist in the particular story you’re writing. Doing so will tell you how both the protagonist and the people around her will act or react to the events of your story.
- The more specific and tangible the stakes are, the more universally accessible and relatable the story will be. That is the value of the list above: All nine of the possible stakes—Sex, Death, Friendship, Family, Money, Identity, Spirituality, and Liberty — are both specific and universal enough to resonate with any possible reader.
- The more pressing the stakes are for your specific character, the more dramatic the story will be. All nine of the possible stakes above have degrees of criticality. Sex can be a casual one-nighter between experienced consenting adults, or it can be the very first sexual encounter between sheltered youths. Death can be the expected passing of a long-suffering octogenarian, or it can be the threat of violent murder from sinister reform-school masters. Friendship can be the rhythmic comfort of decades-long companionship, or it can be an exceedingly rare human presence in an otherwise bleak and solitary existence. When thinking about what’s at stake, think about intensity. Think about the seriousness of the consequences.
