"Stakes"

[phantomtomato]

Thinking about the element of stakes within a story: high, low, no. I'm not a plot-driven writer and have no interest in becoming one at this point. I've been reactionary in the past and, as a result, described myself as writing no-stakes stories—but I don't think that's quite accurate anymore. Er, in the sense that I don't think it was ever accurate, and I now wouldn't apply the term to my writing, past or present.

What I am interested in doing is learning to define a set of low-stakes issues which are driving a story. It might just be my perspective as an outsider, but it usually feels like the stakes in a plotty story are laid out clearly at the start: Gideon the Ninth opens on the idea that for the Ninth House to survive, Harrrowhark must succeed in becoming a Lyctor, whatever that means; if the White Witch isn't defeated in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe, then Narnia will remain in eternal winter and all the Pevensie children will probably die. High stakes: there's probably a chance of death involved. Easy! Obvious. Evil wins, or the nation ends, the bomb goes off, and so forth.

Low-stakes stories are harder to see from the outset, I think—even though this is what I tend to write, I don't usually start by defining the meaning of failure. Maybe it would help as part of the planning process for stories? On the one hand, being primarily driven by character arcs, I'm not as interested in the concept of failure. I don't typically think of their emotional endpoints as failing, no matter what they are, because the progression to get there was fun for me to write about. On the other, though, I wonder if it would help articulate motivations in the middle, as we've moved past the initial spark of the story premise and haven't yet entered the final slide towards the end.

Comments

[yletylyf]

Yeah! There is still something at stake in a ship-fic where the question is simply do they learn to share enough of themselves to be together, or do they not? 'Failure' defined as the ship not getting together may not be 'failure' in the conventional sense - after all, it could set you up to write a reunion for the ship years later, or to write another, better-fitting ship incorporating lessons learned from the previous relationship (my personal favorite kind of fic!). So maybe 'failure' is the wrong word, but certainly you can see the characters have goals and 'failure' may be not meeting those goals, even if in the long term it was better that they didn't.

'Failure' in my brand of canon-adjacent fix-it fic usually looks like the canon outcome, which makes this a very interesting intellectual exercise for me to think about. It's not dramatic, because the outcome is predetermined: I am writing a fix-it; canon will not happen. But usually I find it interesting to ask how and why we get there using the same settings and characters for a different outcome.

[phantomtomato]

Your recontextualization of failure made me think of another difficulty I have with stakes! Most stories don’t give us real failure. I mean, some do—but that’s such a specific writing goal that I think it reshapes the planning process, at least for me. But for e.g. that fix-it fic, or the get-together plot, there’s not usually a possibility of writing towards the end and hitting the fail state. The stakes aren’t very real to me as the creator, and I think that’s part of why I tend to find the entire concept boring. Whoops!

I really love the journey. It’s always about what happens along the way for me, the small moments of character development. “How and why we get there using the same settings and characters for a different outcome” is a good way of putting it.

[leftsidedown]

I wonder whether this could also be a difference between fanfiction vs original fiction! the stakes help us get invested in characters quickly, gives them a goal/motivations, sets up a clear External Arc -- whereas in fanfiction we're coming from a common canon, which means we already know these characters (to a certain extent), we're already invested in them, which makes low-stakes interiority-heavy stories have appeal that original fiction wouldn't have. I guess what I'm wondering is, can you think of original fiction you'd classify as low-stakes, would you read 'low-stakes' stories fandom blind/if you didn't know or care about the original characters, that sort of thing?

[phantomtomato]

Haha, uh, yes. Pretty much all of my original reading is very low-stakes, and I’m a strong proponent of reading fic canon-blind. It’s not an issue for me of needing an intense plot in order to connect with characters! Usually the opposite, if anything.

In thinking and talking about stakes, I’m trying to get interested in the writerly perspective. Precisely because I’m so driven by low-stakes stories which focus on the mundane, I tend not to notice or care about any stakes at all. What were the stakes in the Isherwood book I read last month? Idk! I was just there to follow a professor around for a day, and the prose and his routine activities gripped me so effectively that I finished the book in one sitting. But if there’s a way to make stakes-based framing useful as a writer of these types of stories, maybe it’s worth trying.