How to Write Great Stakes in Your Book, Part 1

​Today I’m going to be discussing how to write great stakes in your book. Stakes are the answer to the reader’s question of “Yes, but why should I care?” Stakes can be internal or external—and, for the most part, are both—and they should have a quite narrow focus; imminent, world-devastating effects; and finally, it should be possible for the protagonist to either win or lose.

(If you’d like to view this post in video format, click here. It’s part of our “Advice from an Editor” series on YouTube.)

​Let’s start with internal vs. external. By “internal stakes,” I mean stakes that directly impact the protagonist. External stakes impact everyone else. An example of internal stakes would be the protagonist’s feelings and relationship and status and job and, even to some extent, the protagonist’s life.

A fantastic example of a book in which there are really only internal stakes is Madness by Marya Hornbacher. Madness (or Madness: A Bipolar Life) is the author’s memoir about having bipolar disorder with psychosis. During this book, the protagonist is always fighting with her own mood disorder and with her own mind and perceptions—and also with her struggles with alcoholism and an eating disorder. And the disorder is getting worse and worse, and she’s getting misdiagnosed and she herself is reacting badly to it, but ultimately, that’s what’s at stake. What’s at stake is: “Will our protagonist spend the rest of her life in a permanent state of manic or depressive psychosis in a mental hospital?” The stakes are not: “What will happen to her significant other? What will happen to her job? Will they have to hire someone else?”

On the other end of the spectrum, you have your action-thriller James Bond type story where the stakes are all external. In this case, our protagonist is in no danger. If he fails, nothing’s going to happen to him—his romantic life will be fine; he’ll still be alive. BUT if he doesn’t succeed, the villain’s bomb is going to go off, killing thousands, or they’ll release a plague, or something like that.

We’ll come back later to how effective this sort of stake actually is. But finally, I want to move on to the most common type of stakes, which are both internal and external. And for this I’m going to use A Christmas Carol by Charles Dickens as my example. In A Christmas Carol, we have two main sets of stakes. The first are internal to Scrooge. Scrooge’s personal mental health, good behavior, and eventual salvation or damnation rely upon his changing. Those are what’s at stake for him. We learn to care about these things through following him with the Spirit of Christmas Past and seeing him as he once was, as a child, as a young man, seeing his slow evolution, realizing he doesn’t have to be like this.

And then we move on to the Ghost of Christmas Present and we get our second stake. Now, throughout following Scrooge around, we do see a whole variety of people who are impacted by his bad behavior—we saw his ex-fiancée, we saw his nephew, and we eventually see one of the families that he loaned money to and who suffered from it. But the main stake here comes from Bob Cratchit Jr., because if Scrooge does not change his ways, then Junior will die within the year. And that is our external stake.

Note here how focused the stakes are. Yes, Scrooge does affect lots and lots of people, and there are sort-of background stakes like the other people he’s lent money to, but the focus stays on Scrooge and on Junior. This is good writing, and this is important. And the reason why it’s important to have a narrow focus when it comes to stakes is that human beings naturally can’t focus on everything at once. What we need is a smaller group, an individual or only a few individuals, to focus on. You see this a lot in charity work. It’s pretty well known through statistics and also through stories people tell that if you really want someone to give to charity, you don’t go to them with statistics and say, “X number of children are starving in X location,” because the faceless masses just aren’t motivational for people. What’s motivational is if you get a picture of a single, starving child and you say, “This child is hungry, and you’d help this child if you give money.”

So how many people or groups of people can be at stake for the stakes to still be effective? There’s no perfect answer to this—I haven’t studied it scientifically. But what I have read, scientifically, years back, was a very interesting article on how, on average, humans can remember and keep track of up to seven items or seven groups of items at once. There’s a reason why, in America, our base phone numbers are seven digits long—it’s because most people, if you tell them a seven-digit phone number, will be able to remember it, at least in the short term.

​We see something similar when it comes to books. In The Lord of the Rings, the Fellowship has nine members. But generally speaking, we don’t remember them as nine members . . . unless we know the story really well. Instead, we remember them as: Frodo, Sam, the other two Hobbits, Gandalf, the Elf and Dwarf, Aragorn, and [the doomed redshirt Sean Bean ;)]. And these are sometimes even clumped down lower by, for example: the Hobbits, the wizard, the humans, and the other ones. We clump them down, and that makes them easier to remember and to track, follow, and care about. If your focus is too broad, if you don’t have faces to put to the people you’re supposed to care about, it’s really hard for the reader to care about them—and why make them do that much work? Because a lot of the time, they won’t.

I’ll stop here and pick up next time with why stakes should be imminent and world-devastating. Do you have any other advice or thoughts about creating great stakes in a book? Tell us in the comments!

For more writing tips, check out our Advice from an Editor YouTube series, or this set of blog posts.

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Deborah J. Natelson

​​Deborah lives with a fluffy member of fauna named Flora. She is the author of Bargaining Power, a smart, twisty fantasy thriller; The Midnight Files, a serialized, action-packed dark fantasy on Kindle Vella; and various other books. Her author website is www.deborahjnatelson.com.