The term “high stakes” might evoke gambling chips and smoke-filled rooms, but don’t let this fool you into thinking this crucial element of writing craft only applies to the high-octane thriller.
In fact, it’s something every novel needs.
Without the presence of high stakes woven into your story, you’ll struggle to persuade a reader to stick with it, regardless of how good everything else is.
As our children’s fiction writing coach Piers Torday said in a recent genre fiction workshop at The Novelry:
You can have brilliant characters, and rich and enticing worlds. You can have hilarious and moving dialogue, and a very inventive chain of events. But, unless the stakes are high enough, we just don’t care as a reader.
—Piers Torday
How do you raise the stakes in your own novel? And what about quiet literary novels, do they need high stakes too?
In this article, author and The Novelry writing coach Kate Riordan explains how to raise external stakes, combine them with internal stakes, and suggests adding “mini stakes” to craft a novel readers will care about long after they put it down.
Identifying your novel’s stakes
Identifying your own novel’s stakes doesn’t have to be as complicated or daunting as it might seem at first glance.
As our senior editor Josie Humber explains:
Stakes are the consequences if your character doesn’t achieve their goals.
—Josie Humber
In a video on The Novelry’s TikTok, Josie uses Gillian Flynn’s multi-million-selling novel Gone Girl as an example. When the story opens, Nick’s wife Amy has gone missing. It’s already an intriguing premise but Flynn doesn’t stop there, and hugely raises the stakes by making Nick the prime suspect for his wife’s murder. He’ll go to jail if he doesn’t find her. Pretty high stakes!
But to get to your story’s consequences, you first need to understand your protagonist’s goals. Josie advises writing a simple, bullet-pointed list to focus your mind and hone your thinking. Cut through the subplots and secondary characters, and drill down into what your hero wants to achieve above all else. And the other side of the coin: what they want to stop happening.
Once you’ve got your list, take each point and write down what will happen if those goals aren’t realised. As Josie says, those are your stakes.
And when you’ve figured all that out, it’s time to consider pushing it to the next level. In other words, making things even worse for your poor benighted hero.
Raising those stakes even more
Layer up the risk factors for your main character to keep raising the stakes. Doing so will inject plenty of tension and suspense into your narrative.
Say your hero is at risk of losing their job. That already gives the reader a reason to care what happens next, but what if the job is a long-established family business entrusted to them to rescue? And what if you add a ticking clock, just to really ramp up the jeopardy? There’s nothing like a deadline to keep the reader enthralled. Maybe the bank is calling in a loan in a month’s time. Maybe the terrifying family matriarch is arriving next week, to see if your hero is up to the task.
Here’s something to consider: ask yourself if the events in your novel are the most challenging of your main character’s life. If they aren’t, you might be telling the wrong story, or focusing on the wrong character.
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But what about a quiet novel? Does this still apply?
You might assume high stakes are more applicable to certain kinds of fiction—crime, suspense, psychological thrillers; novels very much at the commercial end of the market. But every story needs a reader’s investment. Without that, the whole artifice crumbles. Instead of enabling the reader to suspend their disbelief and get happily lost in a world they can’t tear themselves away from, they put down the book with a shrug.
Remember, stakes don’t have to be dangerous or dramatic. Your thoughtful, nuanced portrait of an overprotective father and his teenage daughter doesn’t have to become a reprise of Liam Neeson in Taken. In a quieter, more reflective novel, the stakes will be adjusted so they’re tonally appropriate and proportionate to the story. But make no mistake, they do need to be present.
Our writing coach Emylia Hall has worked with many of our writers on their literary fiction novels and she explains it like this:
When we talk about stakes it doesn’t always have to be life or death—but, for our hero, it has to feel like it. So, ask yourself, what’s the one thing your hero holds dear, and that they value above all else? It could be their independence, their loyalty, their job, their cat! And then think of a way to threaten that. Remember, stakes can be relative—a big part of an author’s job is to bring our characters so fully to life that we can feel how much they care about something (anything!)—and then we care too.
—Emylia Hall
And caring for characters brings us to the type of stakes you can employ to make your novel even more affecting and unputdownable.
Add internal or emotional stakes
If you’re still not convinced your story needs high stakes, it’s probably because you’re thinking about external stakes rather than those that come from within.
Put simply, external stakes are plotty, while internal stakes are character-driven.
In fact, a compulsive but layered novel will almost certainly contain a blend of both. (And if you’re feeling really clever, you could also put your theme to work, for a third tier of more philosophical and abstract stakes.)
It’s easy to understand the difference between internal and external stakes with the example of the procedural detective novel. Externally driving the plot is the central crime our hero detective is trying to solve. But it’s beyond the hours of the day job that the internal or emotional stakes come into play. Perhaps your detective hero is trying to save her ailing marriage or—that reliable troubled cop trope—cut down on her drinking.
In Gillian McAllister’s latest novel, Just Another Missing Person (spoiler alert coming up!), dedicated detective Julia has a missing woman to find. The circumstances of the disappearance are bizarre and inexplicable, which is gripping in itself, and we also have a ticking clock (the longer the woman is missing, the less likely it is that she’ll be found alive), but McAllister doesn’t presume the reader will care enough about these external stakes to read on. Instead, she adds huge personal stakes in the form of a terrible dilemma: if Julia solves the case, a secret she has covered up will come out and her teenage daughter will go to prison. In effect, her life’s two non-negotiable goals (protecting her beloved child and excelling at her beloved job) threaten to pull her whole life apart. Massive consequences and very high stakes indeed.
A final tip for raising the stakes
Once you’ve nailed your overall stakes, consider adding some mini stakes to each chapter. It’ll move your story along at a clip and make it even more addictive. It will also force you to justify the existence of each and every scene.
For more insights into literary techniques, coaching and a supportive writing community, join us on a creative writing course at The Novelry – the world’s top-rated writing school.
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