Characters care about external stakes. READERS care about internal stakes.
OK. Here's a distinction I've recently started to think about and really notice after reading and watching some things that handle this poorly.
Fiction needs stakes, right? We all agree on that?
Characters have to be doing something, and they need some reason to do things, and there has to be some kind of reward for succeeding or consequence if they fail, yeah?
Cool. So here's the thing about stakes. They can be internal or external.
External stakes are things like: "if we don't do this, the sun will explode" or "if we do this, we'll win the game."
Often, to make things more interesting, external stakes have a ticking clock attached to them. You have to complete your quest before the next full moon or else the spell won't work for another hundred years. You have to score the winning point before the buzzer goes off in five seconds. That tension is important to shuffling the story forward.
But here's the thing.
The reader doesn't give a fuck about the external stakes and the ticking clock. We know perfectly well they're not going to miss the window for the spell or fuck up the finals game. We understand how stories work and how genre conventions work and you're not impressing anyone with your ticking clock.
What readers do actually care about is a character's internal stakes.
Internal stakes are things like "if I can save the world, I can finally absolve myself of guilt for letting my mom die." Or "if I win this game, my crush will finally notice me."
They are personal motivations. They are the reason why your character cares about what they're doing. They are why we care and how we get invested in their story.
Because like. We're humans. At the end of the day, we care about human things and we have human emotions and we relate to people -- even fake people made of scribbles on paper -- who care about stuff the way we care about stuff.
Raising the stakes doesn't mean "make the sun explode if they fail." Raising the stakes means "we care about this person and want to see them succeed."
So why bother with the external conflict and the ticking time clock? If what we actually care about in a story is the person, why can't we just read a couple hundred pages of the character going through therapy and working through their trauma?
Because what that ticking time clock does is it forces a character to act before they're ready. It prevents them from procrastinating. And it makes them do stuff they're not prepared for. And it's thrilling to see them interact with stuff that way, because it forces them out of their comfort zone and into an area where they can grow and challenge their status quo...which is the thing that pushes on those internal conflict bruises.
Imagine that our heroes have as much time as they need to fulfill the prophecy. They can take their time training, studying, making failsafes and backup plans and then go and the plan goes off without a hitch and they save the day without breaking a sweat. That's boring! That's just people going to work. That doesn't force them to confront their inner demons at all! That doesn't rip them from their existing environment and leave them struggling to adapt to new circumstances!
So those external stakes are necessary to keep the plot rolling forward and put pressure on the characters. But ALL OF THAT is only important if that pressure reveals interesting things about those characters, and forces them to engage with the stuff deep inside that they're probably hiding from. Because that's the part that's juicy and interesting for the reader.
Capiche?
Great tips!
