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September Fawkes has done an excellent job in this article about stakes in scenes and fiction. Reading it, I felt intense jealousy over the fact that I hadn’t thought of it first. The way she has parsed the ideas has made me reevaluate my own works in progress and made me think of several instances in books and in fiction that the stakes could have been more effectively used.
September suggests thinking of the stakes not as the risks, but as the potential consequences of failure. What could happen if the protagonist doesn’t act? What would it mean to them? When it comes to revising Kingdom of the Lion, I think I need to make the stakes for Pryad more explicit in the first chapter. Conversely, in my current WIP, I think the personal consequences are at least adequately clear because I express my stakes to the reader more or less directly.
When working with an established author I was introduced to from Facebook, I was recently told to raise the stakes in my scenes, to increase the risk to the protagonists. I struggled with this idea – how do I raise the stakes when they’re already pretty darn big. But with September’s take on them, it makes more sense: Increase the potential consequences for the protagonists, in scope, breath or severity. Either make the consequences worse, make the consequences affect more people or change what the consequences could be.
Another great feature of this essay is the way that September parses those consequences, similar in approach to an article I remember reading from Johnn Four, the RPG blogger when he discussed Dungeon World and loopy planning. Using Kingdom of the Lion as an example, the stakes in chapter one’s first scene are:
IF Pryad doesn’t get some food for Malassa, THEN she might lose the baby. IF Sarhu stays with Pryad and helps him, THEN he could be captured and suffer the same fate as his ‘big brother’. IF Pryad doesn’t put up a strong facade, THEN he might be taken advantage of sexually in prison.
I really appreciate the way that this method makes the risks clearer and more precise, less ephemeral. I think this method is going to have a lasting effect on my plotting and writing.
What do you think of this approach? Let me know what you think in the comments below!
If you’re still drawing a blank about what conflict and stakes are, perhaps watch this video from Alexa Donne’s Youtube Channel:
Imagine Erratically 
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