How to Create Stakes that Draw Readers In
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The following blog post has been excerpted from the FriesenPress writing guide: How to Write a Book Worth Publishing. Click here or scroll to the end for your free download!
Whenever I teach a new class of creative writing students, I will ask them this question early on: What is the most important thing in any piece of writing—be it a sentence, a paragraph, or a whole chapter?
Then I field the answers and make a list. This is what they usually come up with:
It should be well written;
It should be grammatical;
It should advance the plot;
And it should develop the character(s).
All true. But what is rarely offered, and what I then write in at Number One, is this:
It should make the reader want to keep reading.
Let’s face it: the best, most beautifully written, grammatically correct, plot-advancing and character-developing paragraph in the world is practically worthless if the reader is not going to then go on and read the next paragraph. There are so many other things to be doing at any given time in the world (like checking Facebook, streaming the latest binge-worthy television, or rearranging the sock drawer). A writer has to give the reader a reason to ignore all other distractions and stick with the book.
How writers do this is by creating and then sustaining the stakes.
“The stakes” means what is at stake? What is the character facing? What will they have to risk to succeed? What obstacles will they need to overcome both externally (the situation, the weather, the place, the enemy) and internally (their phobias, faults, insecurities). Stakes provide the opportunity for conflict. Conflict is drama. Readers like drama. It keeps them away from their sock drawer.
Consider this sentence: It was unseasonably cold for a late May night but the former occupant of the gibbet was too dead to care, and his replacement too unconscious.
Setting aside that some people will only have a vague idea what a gibbet is (it’s a structure for hanging people), they will still know it is threatening. This sentence might violate one of the rules above; it might not actually be entirely grammatical (can one be “too unconscious”?). But in a single sentence, we learn that one person is dead and one unconscious, and that they are trapped in a bad place with no clear way to escape. The stakes are clear and there are questions to be answered (who are these people? Why are they in a gibbet? How will the living one get out?). The reader will want to read on to find out. Facebook can wait.
That sentence was the first of my career as a novelist, opening Chapter 1 of The French Executioner. It’s called a hook. Stakes are largely created from a series of hooks. And once a fish is hooked, as any angler will tell you, you need to keep ‘em hooked. To do so, as a gambler might say, you’ll need to up the ante.
Yet constantly raising stakes from the first sentence on may make for an exciting ride for a while, but that excitement would dull if it disconnected from character. The situation may be bad, but if it is happening to someone you don’t care about, the stakes don’t matter. So while there is certainly the need to hook people—to make the reader read that next sentence—the writer then has to give them someone to root for or against. (Preferably both.) In that first chapter of The French Executioner I hooked, introduced the hero and the two main villains, and established the central conflict in four pages. All using action.
In setting up the stakes you also need to oscillate the nature of the character’s situation, which may be perilous, humourous, or seemingly innocuous (these usually reveal character or establish foreshadowing). Each subsequent scene should raise the stakes by building on what you have established. Up the ante.
My system is this: Begin with a hook. That is usually an arresting image, or a very direct piece of action. The Latin phrase in media res applies here. It is much loved by screenwriters and translates to “in the middle of things.” Begin in the middle of something to set the stakes, then work backwards. A screenwriter might refine this by saying of any scene, “Get in late, get out early.”
As a novelist, if you are obsessed with laying everything out before the hot action happens, the reader is likely to have moved back to Candy Crush. I have been consulted numerous times about submissions to agents or publishers in which the author says “I’m going to send them Chapter Five—it gets really good then.” Uh-uh. You need to hook your reader with Chapter One. An agent or publisher knows how readers read; they will have given up long before Chapter Five. They may not even have made it to Sentence Five! You need to start with the stakes high and the hook deeply embedded.
So the core elements of stakes are hook (usually action), character (usually in peril), and a realized world—somewhere/somewhen other than where the reader is or a very different perspective on a place a reader might already know. Thus I am not only talking about fiction here. The best nonfiction books show us a part of a world we inhabit but an aspect we do not know. The best nonfiction writers will use exactly the same methods—hook, character, and place—to keep the reader reading.
Establishing and sustaining the stakes require somewhat different approaches. That’s where oscillation comes in. I often speak about the compact a writer makes with a reader, which begins with that first sentence. “Here’s a world you are going to enjoy spending time in.” The writer says, “I know it well, and I am going to reveal it to you, fully realized. Here’s a character or two you are going to enjoy getting to know.”
Once a reader feels that they can trust a writer, from the first sentence, they will go on to read the next sentence. Then the paragraph, the chapter, the book, and the sequel. That’s how the writer will have a career: when the reader loses themselves in a world where stakes are high and the journey is far more riveting than any potential distraction.
Chris Humphreys teaches writing when he’s not writing award-winning and bestselling novels of his own. Chris has authored more than eighteen published books over his two decade career, with such illustrious houses as Doubleday, Knopf, and Orion. Learn more about Chris on his website.
