Hello, writers. I just put down a book by a writer I usually like. In chapter one we learned that the heroine was wealthy, beautiful, talented, and intelligent. In chapter two we found out that her cousin, whom she didn't like, had just been falsely accused of treason. The heroine set out to prove him innocent, and I threw the book across the room. (But gently, because it was a library book.)
What's the problem here?
Stakes, that's what.
I never heard the term "stakes" used to refer to plot development in fiction until I read Donald Maass's Writing the Breakthrough Novel Workbook (which you should read, but with a certain number of grains of salt on hand). But stakes are what your protagonist, and the world you've created, have to gain or lose. The higher they are, the closer your reader is to the edge of his/her chair.
So you need to raise them. Higher. Crank them up.
You need to raise them, and then you need to make the reader care that you've raised them. As the story goes on, the stakes should get raised higher and higher. There's more to lose, there's more at risk, and the reader cares because she cares about your characters.
Some famous stakes:
Life and death. Usually your best bet. It even gets dragged into romances, where some evil guy generally tries not very convincingly to kill the heroine, who pluckily rescues herself and then screws it up and has to be re-rescued by the hero. In murder mysteries, the killer is generally still killing, because trying to solve a one-off murder leaves your characters woefully unendangered.
Often, in mysteries, just when you and the characters have drawn a bead on the killer, the killer gets murdered. Whoops! The danger isn't where we thought it was: stakes raised.
In the book I threw across the room, the life-and-death stake offered at the outset was the possible execution of a cousin the protag didn't even like. Not good enough. No doubt the protag herself was going to be in danger soon, but this reader was already gone.
A fate worse than death. Or, if not worse than death, pretty darned bad. A life sentence in prison. Marriage to a mean nasty person. Grinding poverty leading to slow starvation. In Mark Zusak's I Am the Messenger, there's an unconvincing effort to make death the stake, but the real stake is a meaningless, detached life spent drinking and playing cards.
A nice subset of the fate-worse-than-death is the protag battling for control of his or her own mind. You can get a whole book out of that; you don't really need anything else. The threat can be mental illness, drug addiction, or Big Brother.
Oppression. This provides both stakes (the need to escape from oppression) and instant sympathy, which makes us care about the character and therefore about the stakes. Cinderella stories will always be popular-- Harry Potter starts out as a Cinderella story, before more, higher stakes are introduced.
In historical fiction, African American and female characters are both useful for this kind of stakes-raising. (I've used both shamelessly.) No matter what they do, they're likely to land in the soup, and their resources for getting out of it will be almost non-existent. Historically tragic, but fictionally golden.
A way of life. This can be micro-- "we can't get the money for the mortgage on the farm," or macro-- in Grapes of Wrath, everybody loses the farm. It can be static, with your characters trying desperately to cling to what little they've got, or to defend their brave little nation from a mighty invader, or to get Sharkey and his satanic mills out of the Shire. Or it can be transformative, the classic hero's journey to arrive at a new form of community.
The whole damn world. As any of us old enough to remember the Cold War know, the thought of death is less overwhelming than the thought that nothing will survive after we're gone. Except cockroaches.
Total annihilation is always a useful threat if you can make it work-- nuclear war, a deadly pandemic, Voldemort, the Rapture. (Though in the Left Behind series, it's my understanding that total annihilation is actually A Good Thing. But since none of us will ever read it, I guess we don't actually know.)
Anyway, these are just a few examples of the many kinds of stakes you can raise, great and small. All require that the reader care about the characters, natch.
Got a favorite stake-raising method you'd like to share?
Write On! will be a regular Thursday feature (8 pm ET) until it isn't. Be sure to check out other great lit'ry diaries like:
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plf515's What Are You Reading? on Wednesday mornings.
cfk's bookflurries on Wednesday nights.
Your happy writing links for the week:
You should try this, it really works. (And Bruce Coville is, of course, a kossack.)
Will self-publishing lead to the death of reading? I'm inclined to think not.
About revisions.
Speaking of stakes, it's hard to raise the stakes when your protag is already dead.
Here's a site where you can get your first page critiqued for grippiness.
This is just funny.
On what it feels like to get all those rejections. But we already know this.
Does anyone understand what amazon is doing here? Because I don't.
About book publicity.
Never, ever sign anything with any agent or publisher whom you haven't checked out at Writer Beware or Preditors and Editors. If you can't find anything on the publisher there, that's not good news.