Raise the Stakes
Featuring Aliens and Debutantes
One day I’m going to set an essay live with the subtitle “Subtitle Subtitle” because that’s the placeholder text I use when I haven’t thought of a subtitle for the article yet, like today. Sometimes the subtitle reveals itself to me in the course of writing the article and sometimes I have to scramble and come up with something at the last minute, hopefully something catchy. Let’s see what kind it will be today.
Tuesday’s article touched on stakes and I was getting off track so I put a pin in that and am coming back to it now. This happens a lot with Shelf Life. In the course of writing any one Shelf Life I usually come up with at least one future article idea, sometimes more than one. Sometimes many. This is why Shelf Life will never end. Every one I write spawns several more. It’s like cutting off the head of a Hydra. Two more sprout from the open wound.
A story must have stakes. A stake in the sense we’re talking about today is the same as the gambling sense: It’s something of value that is risked on a venture (or an adventure, as the case may be). Not a stake like you kill a vampire with. The stakes are what your protagonist stands to gain if they are successful in their mission or endeavor, or what they have to lose if they are unsuccessful. Preferably both.
Fun fact: We used to have an area steakhouse called Ray’s The Steaks. They spun off another restaurant called Ray’s Hell Burger. Washington DC is a town that appreciates a good pun (and a good steak). Actually both restaurants are closed now so maybe we don’t.
When you are sitting down to begin work on your story—whether you’re a pantser who’s just going to jump right into the manuscript draft or you’re a plotter who’s sitting down to start your outline—one of the first things you need to know and show are the stakes. By “and show” I mean you shouldn’t introduce stakes halfway through the story. There are certainly stories where that happens but to be honest those are going to be much harder to sell when you’re starting out.
There have to be some stakes laid out fairly early. It doesn’t have to be page one but chapter one is a good idea. This can sometimes present significant difficulty, especially in speculative fiction where you might feel like there’s a lot of worldbuilding that must precede the introduction of stakes. “I need to introduce the world before I can tell the reader how it’s at risk!” Okay, this is true.
That’s why today’s Shelf Life is not about how to determine your protagonist’s one-time-only or even their ultimate stakes, but how to escalate stakes as you go. The stakes you introduce right there on page one don’t have to be the ultimate stakes of the story. Not even close.
In most feature-length stories (not short stories or flash fiction, which are plotted on a different order of magnitude), the protagonist will not have just one goal that sustains them through the entire story. There is likely an overarching goal they have that will carry through the whole work, but that needn’t be (and probably is not) their only goal the whole time. Their goal will change as the situation they are in changes. Changing up the situation on your protagonist is a little thing we call storytelling. So that is definitely going to happen in your manuscript.
I am going to draw from the story I know better than any other to illustrate this concept of stakes-raising. That story is Aliens (1986), obviously, my favorite movie. If you have not seen Aliens, first of all what are you even doing with your life, but second of all maybe stop reading now and go watch it because it’s the best movie of all time, and also because I’m going to go through the plot in detail and spoil it for you if you haven’t seen it.
It’s like two and a half hours long so you can go watch it now and be back to finish reading Shelf Life by noon. Anyway, let’s do a close “reading” of the “text” of Aliens together to look at how stakes escalate in the course of a story.
A brilliant thing about Aliens is that the escalation of stakes is even right there in the title of the movie. It’s the sequel to Alien. With one little letter the title of this movie says: “Oh you thought one xenomorph was scary? Well we have some bad news for you.”
At the outset of Aliens, Ellen Ripley has survived the events of Alien but unfortunately drifted around in space in suspended animation for sixty-seven years and by the time she’s found there’s not much left of her original life. She ends up stuck on Gateway Station driving a futuristic forklift because she’s been legally dead for decades and she has to start over from nothing and her flight privileges are suspended (she blew up a very expensive ship at the end of Alien), so she can’t do the type of work she’s been trained for. This is her situation at the outset. Crummy job. Not much going for her. She’s offered the chance to have her flight license reinstated if she goes with the Colonial Marines to LV426 (the moon where she originally encountered the alien) to find out why the colony there has ceased communication.
Okay so these are her original stakes: I’m Ellen Ripley and my life sucks now and my big goal in that sucky life is to never see a xenomorph ever again. Then someone comes along and says: Hey, I can improve that sucky life situation but there’s a small risk you might see a xenomorph. If Ripley takes this opportunity, the possible negative outcome is that she might encounter another alien and that is the main thing she never wants to do; but if she takes this risk, she could get her life back on some kind of track.
That’s not enough to sustain a whole movie, though. Those are just the stakes at the outset.
Once Ripley and company get down to the surface of LV426 they find evidence that xenomorphs have wiped out the colony and meet an eight-year-old child (Newt) who is the only survivor of the alien attack. The stakes change for Ripley here. It’s no longer about getting her flight license reinstated. Forget the flight license. Now she’s encountered a xenomorph; that risk is out the window. The new stakes are her life: Can she stay alive long enough to get on the Cheyenne (the dropship) and get off that moon and back to the Sulaco (the main spaceship). Further, it’s worth noting that in the context of the movie, Ripley is the only character we know for sure is a parent. Ripley not only has to get herself off LV426, but the eight-year-old kid as well.
Next the Cheyenne crashes. The stakes change again. We no longer need to stay alive long enough to get on the Cheyenne and back to the Sulaco. We now need to stay alive long enough for someone to notice that the Colonial Marine battalion isn’t responding to comms and send a rescue ship. The odds of surviving long enough for the rescue to arrive are slim.
Next the fusion reactor at the center of the colony begins melting down, and the stakes change further. Now there is no hope of hunkering down and awaiting a rescue; Ripley and Newt will be dead in a nuclear explosion long before help arrives.
During this time the stakes escalate in another direction as well: While Ripley believed the stakes in this escape-from-LV mission were her life and the lives of the others who are there with her, she learns there is actually a much greater threat in that one member of their company is hoping to smuggle the xenomorph back to Gateway Station for study (and, presumably, weaponization). Now it is not just Ripley, and Newt, and the others who are trapped on LV426 with them, who are at risk. It’s also everyone everywhere.
When we met Ripley at the beginning of Aliens the stakes were her flight license. By the end it’s her life, the life of the child under her protection, the lives of the surviving Marines, oh and also all the people on Gateway Station. Plus all the people on the other side of the “gateway” that Gateway Station is named for. You know, Earth.
An unfun Alien franchise fact is that the third movie in the trilogy was supposed to conclude Ripley’s story with a fight against xenomorphs on Earth, but that was too expensive so we got the awful Alien3 instead. Life is really unfair sometimes.
Alright, so taking what we’ve learned from the Aliens example, we can distill that down to guidance on how to keep stakes escalating throughout any story. I think we can actually concentrate it into three rules.
Begin with local or personal stakes.
Escalate stepwise; don’t jump from personal to global or universal in one bound.
Introduce the final or ultimate stakes by the halfway point.
First, beginning with local or personal stakes. In most stories, you don’t start with a huge cast of characters and a world-spanning setting. You start with one person and their immediate situation. The initial stakes should be found in there. Think of The Hobbit. By the end, Bilbo’s trying to navigate the Battle of the Five Armies but at the start he just wants to get a host of dwarves out of his house as soon as possible because they are drinking all his booze, eating all his snacks, and putting his tidy, well-kept home into disarray.
Next, escalate stepwise. Introduce the next-higher set of stakes and explore those, their implications, and their resolution before you throw in the next escalation. This is a situation where I don’t think you want like a continuous, uninterrupted ramp-up. Each escalation has to be handled by the characters before the next one starts. The formula is, in essence, problem arises > characters address problem > resolution of problem > new problem arises from resolution or from methods of addressing previous problem.
Finally, make sure the ultimate stakes are introduced in plenty of time for the climax of your story. You don’t want to keep escalating stakes on a steep upward trajectory till the last minute. The characters have to have time to understand these ultimate stakes, come to terms with what they stand to lose and gain, and then find a way to triumph (or not, if you’re writing a tragedy).
Thought exercise: What if you’re not writing an adventure story? What if you’re writing, say, a romance? A romantic comedy? Does that need stakes?
Yes, all stories need stakes. Jane Austen was like the original rom com writer and her stories all have stakes—stakes that escalate throughout the story, I might add. Take Emma, for example. Emma feels she has a talent for matchmaking but the more she tries to do it the worse she makes things for everyone. Ultimately her actions cause her friend Harriet to fall in love with Mr Knightley, with whom Emma is also in love. The more she meddles, the worse she puts her own happiness at risk.
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