Staking Out Your Story, Part 2: Raising the Stakes, From Beginning to End

How to escalate both suspense and meaning

Photo by Dave Hoefler on Unsplash

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Good stories make us care by constantly upping the ante (Henry James would say “turning the screws”) until the stakes that are driving choices in the final scene bear little obvious resemblance to the stakes that drew us into the story to begin with.

Hello, Loreates,

Last week I introduced the topic of stakes with a deepish dive into the roles of loss and desire in framing the emotional pillars of your story. If you missed it, catch up here:

Staking Out Your Story, Part 1: Signaling the Heart of Character Motivation

The subsequent timing of this Wednesday’s Writer In The World post about The Turn of the Screw as metafiction was accidental. I’d already scheduled it when I realized that turning the screws of fiction is basically the same thing as raising the stakes. At any rate, if you’re a Henry James fan and would like to learn how he cleverly disguised a creative writing manual as one of the most confounding ghost stories in all of literature, you can read that here:

'Turning the Screws' of Story Construction with Henry James

Today, I’ll press on with direct advice about turning those narrative screws. As James’s “pot-boiling study” of his “fatal technical passion” suggests, these are strategies every story writer needs to know.*

*Please note: If you are just beginning to compose your current project, read this post as background information only, and wait until you reach the revision process to apply the how-to strategies to your own work. Otherwise, all this technical intel can stifle the creative freedom you need when first imagining your story.

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Raising Stakes and Keeping Score

Compelling plots push and pull characters, forcing them to act in ways that either increase their losses, or move them closer to their desired goals. The process is analogous to a game: teams/characters compete for the stake, which passes back and forth as players strive to score enough of an advantage for their side to win the game. The excitement of the game/story depends on opposing teams of characters having competitive talent and drive; on the advantage switching often enough to keep the audience guessing about the outcome; and on the fans/readers feeling invested enough in the characters and stakes to genuinely care who scores in each play and who ultimately wins and who loses.

As a general rule, to hold the reader’s interest, the score must be fluid, constantly changing. Stories where one character consistently holds the advantage are as boring as play-offs where the favored team always dominates.

I posted an earlier overview of this process as it plays out in the mechanics of “turning a scene” here:

The 5 R's That Will Keep Your Readers Emotionally Riveted

For quick reference, the 5 Rs represent the storytelling techniques that generate narrative propulsion:

1. Raise the stakes

2. Reverse the score

3. Reveal meaning

4. Redirect expectations

5. Repeat

In a gripping story, this sequence plays out multiple times in every scene, which means that it can play out hundreds, even thousands, of times in a long story. In a novel with many complex characters vying to get their own way, the 5 Rs weave a tapestry of suspense and surprise that builds — ideally — to such peak intensity that the final climactic payoff feels explosive. But that feeling requires meaningful stakes.

As I explained last week:

Story stakes feel most urgent when they’re existential— when the character’s very existence depends on whether they win or lose whatever’s at risk. Even better, their success or failure will determine the fate of loved ones or larger communities.

It’s important to remember, though, that narrative stakes are not static. Good stories make us care by constantly upping the ante (Henry James would say “turning the screws”). So, the initial stakes in a story might seem relatively minor, only rising to existential levels as the story progresses. A billionaire character who’s worried about losing a multi-million-dollar deal in chapter 1 might be moved by fictional events to discover by his story’s end that what’s really at stake is the respect of everyone he ever loved. A widow who’s terrified at the outset that she’s losing her family farm might come to realize through the course of events that her actions will determine the fate of her whole county.

Keep upsetting the status quo