Raising the Stakes

 

No, not those stakes. 

John Green’s novel Paper Towns has the highest possible stakes for a high schooler: suicide of a friend. Q’s friend and crush, Margo, disappears without warning. He and his friends don’t voice their concerns about suicide much, but it’s always there in his head. They finally figure out Margo’s location the morning of their high school graduation. Her location is time-sensitive and they peace out of graduation, still in their caps and gowns, to find her before it’s too late.

The best case scenario here is that Margo is alive and willing to return and be Q’s girlfriend. The worst case scenario is that she’s dead. She has a little sister, who is just as much in the dark as the rest of them, who’d spend the rest of her life mourning a dead sister. I was so stressed about Margo that I skipped to the end to make sure she was alive before I read any further. When they find her alive but unwilling to return, it’s a happy ending, even though the guy doesn’t get the girl, because at least she doesn’t die.

The movie lowers the stakes catastrophically. No one ever discusses the possibility that Margo’s dead, so the worst case scenario is that she’s alive and has made a happy life for herself somewhere. The timing is shifted to well before graduation and shortly before prom. Q’s friends are annoyed with the hunt for Margo and want to turn back before she makes them late for the dance. When Q finally finds Margo, he asks her to at least keep in contact with her sister, to which she smirks, “We talk every day.”

The ending stays that same, but now it’s a downer because the stakes are “Does he get the girl?” instead of “Is the girl alive?”

Death is about as high as your stakes can go. I once read a query in an online writer's forum for a book about a girl whose best friend died in a hit and run accident. The query went on to talk about the girl's relationships and grieving and life in a small town. The author wanted to know how to make her query stronger, so I commented that she needed to put the actual plot there. What is our detective girl doing to track down her friend's killer?

She commented back and said her character did nothing at all. This wasn't a mystery, it was a YA contemporary book about working through grief.

Yes, in real life people do die mysteriously and their loved ones are left without answers. But that's not okay in fiction. Death as a stake is fine and there are plenty of grief novels. But unsolved death is a stake you can only have in mystery novels because it begs resolution. 

A successful example of lowered stakes is Black Panther, my favorite Marvel movie. Usually Marvel gives us a universe in danger, a galaxy in danger, an Earth in danger. Black Panther gives us a country in jeopardy. The stakes aren’t “Will the entire population be killed” but “Will these people lose their privacy and way of life?” The conflict feels so much more personal.

A small-scale stake imbedded in a large-scale stake can personalize the conflict, too. In one of the Alex Rider books, Alex, a teenage British spy, learns of a terrorist plan to bomb Washington D.C. Big deal, he’s British. What happens in America doesn’t affect him. Except his friend Jack is visiting Washington D.C. that week. Killing off a huge number of people (as well as obliterating the government of a hugely influential country) wouldn’t be great, but Jack’s what matters here.

I've read lots of YA contemporary retellings of myths or fairy tales about royalty set in modern high schools. Princes are demoted to quarterbacks. Marriage is demoted to dating. Betrothing yourself to Prince Charming is a big deal because you get to be queen one day with power, money, and influence, but all the quarterback can give you is popularity. No one at my school cared about popularity. There's your friends, the people you know, and then the people you don't know. 

The same goes for schoolifying stories about war. Any modernized story does this, really, even if the characters are adults and more permanent things like marriage and careers are at stake. 

Part of the charm of romantic comedies, stories for children, and Christmas media is the low stakes. The subtle risk "Will this small town have a merry Christmas?" is what makes it so heartwarming in the first place. Lowering stakes isn't a bad thing. Not when it brings the conflict closer to home and your character's heart. When calibrating what's at risk for your characters, make sure your lowered stakes intensify the conflict rather than bringing it down a notch.