How to Write Great Stakes in Your Book, Part 2

Today I’m going to finish discussing how to write great stakes in your book. (Click here to read part 1 of this double post.) Stakes are the answer to the reader’s question of “Yes, but why should I care?”

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

​Not only should stakes be narrow and focused enough, but stakes should also be imminent and world-devastating. By “world-devastating” here, I don’t mean that the stakes might be blowing up the Earth. In general, “the Earth might blow up” is not a good stake to have for the simple reason that it’s not believable—most readers don’t think that the author’s actually going to carry through and blow up the Earth. In fact, the only book I can off-the-cuff think of in which they do blow up the Earth is The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. And that’s actually not a stake in the book; that’s just something that happens. It’s a tertiary plot point—our stakes revolve around our protagonist and his relationships and how he is going to survive now that the Earth’s been blown up.

No, by “world-devastating,” I mean stakes ought to be potentially devastating to the world of the narrative. So in Hornbacher’s Madness, the world of the narrative is her personal world. Her perceptions, her experiences, her relationships, her battle with her mood disorder. That’s the world that will be devastated if she doesn’t succeed, and doesn’t succeed imminently, because the disorder is getting worse and worse—and in some ways, she’s already past the point of no return, and if she doesn’t reform how she’s behaving and how she’s interacting with her disorder—if she doesn’t accept it and get good treatment, it will be too late for her. And if Scrooge does not change his ways, within a year Junior will die. And if Bond doesn’t defuse that bomb now, then it will go off, and it will be too late, and all the people he was trying to protect—the world of the narrative—will die.

And that leads me to my final point, which is: It has to be possible for your protagonist to succeed or to fail. For this point, I want to use Star Trek, the original series, as an example. Let’s say that, in an imaginary episode, we have three possible stakes. One stake is: “Will Captain Kirk live or die?” One is: “Will this main character we’ve never seen before, but we’ve brought in specifically for this episode, die?” And the third is: “Will the redshirt die?” Well, in the first case, Captain Kirk’s not going to die. He’s just not—the showrunners can’t afford to kill him off, and therefore the story can’t afford to allow him to lose. There is no uncertainty here. The watcher knows going in that he will succeed, and because the watcher is certain of this, what’s the worry? Why should we care? We know what the outcome is. At the other end of the spectrum, “Will that redshirt live or die?” . . . The redshirt’s going to die. In 99% of cases, the redshirt is already doomed. So again, there’s no point in the watcher investing because they already know the outcome.

On the other hand, that main character that Star Trek brought in just for that episode—well, we know from the narrative promises of Star Trek what sort of show it is, and we’ve seen from previous episodes that Star Trek is both perfectly willing to kill them off and perfectly inclined to give them a happy ending, and indeed perfectly willing to come up with a third solution. Therefore, there is reason for the watcher to care and to invest; because what happens, what the protagonist does, what that character does . . . they matter. They can have an effect. The writers can afford either to have the stakes fulfilled or failed, and so the watcher can care. And because our focus is so narrow on this one character, whom we’re able to put a face to, we can care. And because the stakes are presumably both for this character and maybe for the larger world as a whole, we can care about that too. And because we know that, within the course of 45 minutes, these stakes will come true or will not. They are imminent, they are world-devastating to this character—we care.

​And that’s good stakes.


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.