Hello everyone! Happy Tuesday. Today we’re going to very briefly discuss stakes. What are stakes? Stakes are what push your story forward and ultimately what drive your main character to change.
Whatever the stakes of your story are, they can’t be negotiable. Your protagonist must be forced into their predicament in some way; it is the quickest and best way to propel character growth and action. There’re a couple methods of doing this:
1) By making the situation close to home for the character, or:
2) By giving the character no other options.
Let’s say your character’s neighbor’s kid disappears. Your character, Jill, had absolutely no connection to the missing child. Sure, she might do something out of some sort of character-driven need to be a savior, but that’s dependent on the personality of said character. A low-charisma person may not feel that drive. If there’s nothing tying you personally to a situation, it would be foolish to be driven emotionally by every single thing that happens.
However, one small adjustment can involve even the most lazy or apathetic character. Instead of the missing child being a neighbor’s kid, the missing child is now Jill’s younger brother and her best friend. Now there are not only huge stakes -- your character really, really feels the need to do everything in her power to find her brother -- but there’s a huge range of emotions that Jill must process and go through as the story progresses. She will never be the person she was before the disappearance of her brother; we are going to watch her become stronger and confront her situation and her emotions head-on.
Now, for part 2: giving the character no other options.
Sometimes, something may not be that close to them emotionally, but physically it forces them into a situation. Let’s use Into the Spiderverse for this example!
There’s a trope in films and books alike about the begrudging mentor situation; that is, a mentor that has been forced into their position of power due to having no other options. In Into the Spiderverse’s case, older Peter Parker is forced to help out Miles Morales not because he has any emotional connection to Miles, but because there’s no other option. He has to help Miles in order to get home. The stakes are clear: if he doesn’t help Miles, he can’t get back to his home world, and he’ll die. So of course, being forced into this mindset shift will ultimately allow Peter to become more open to growth and change.
These situations are fun too, because they’re usually more shallowly apathetic characters that are forced to endure growth and change due to their situation of having no other options challenging their mindset. This is important! Without your life, mindset, or situation being challenged, there is no reason to grow, but we read books and watch movies to watch others grow and change. Without change, there is no story.
Play around with your stakes, and see where they take you!
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