The Novelry on Writing Podcast: How to Add Drama and Raise the Stakes in Your Story

What are the best ways to raise the stakes in a story and keep readers on the edge of their seats? If you’ve ever worried that your story is too quiet, the final episode of season two of our podcast, The Novelry on Writing, is definitely one for you. Editor Josie Humber and writing coach Kate Riordan are here to break down five powerful techniques to raise the stakes and make your story impossible to put down. Their tips include:

• Ways to force your character to confront their fears
• Why introducing a compelling antagonist can elevate conflict and tension
• The secret to adding emotional stakes that will resonate deeply with readers
• How to create an unlikely hero who rises to the challenge in unexpected ways
• The impact of a ticking time bomb to create urgency and keep the plot moving

Read on for the episode transcript!

I think it’s very difficult to identify with something when it isn’t at that emotional, human individual level. We want our readers to walk in our main character’s shoes and empathize, and I actually think it’s very difficult to do that when it’s very large, external sort of stakes.
—Kate Riordan

Introduction

[Kate Riordan] Hi, I’m Kate Riordan. I’m an author coach at The Novelry. I’m also a writer of mystery, suspense, and historical fiction. With me today is the lovely Josie Humber.

[Josie Humber] Hi, I’m Josie Humber. I was a commissioning editor for many years at various publishers, Pan Macmillan and Hodder and Stoughton, and now I’m head of upmarket industry fiction here at The Novelry. I work lots on books and manuscripts. I give feedback to authors who are trying to really tease out what’s good about their novel, what’s not working. And something that comes up a lot in those conversations is what we’re going to talk about today, which is stakes.

[KR] If you’re writing crime and suspense, it’s quite obvious that you need to raise the stakes, but really, it applies to all genres. 

[JH] Absolutely. Quite often, regardless of the genre, if I’m reading and I’m thinking: oh, I’m not really engaging very much, these characters are kind of meandering around a little bit, what’s their purpose... A lot of the time, if you stand back and think: what’s at stake if they don’t do what they’re doing right now, and there’s nothing there, then that can be a really key indicator of why your novel isn’t working.

So, we’ve both come up with some tips today on what could make your novel work better to raise those stakes and really take the drama and tension as high as possible. 

Make sure they can’t walk away 

[JH] My number-one tip is: you’ve got to make sure your main character can’t just walk away from the problem they’ve got. That sounds like such a basic thing to say, it sounds really obvious, but actually, the number of times where a manuscript isn’t quite working and I’m working on the edit, I look at it and think: you’ve thrown all these rocks at this person, all this drama, and they’ve got this huge problem they’re facing, but actually, they could just go home, move back in with their mom, and they’d be fine. 

[KR] You see it a lot in film and TV, and it’s the most annoying thing. You’re saying to the screen: just phone the police!  [Josie laughing]  Just leave the spooky house!

[JH] Yeah! Leave the spooky house, go home, stop trying to get into that basement, and you’ll be fine. I’m just trying to think of examples, and there’s not that many books published where the stakes feel low like that because they wouldn’t get published. So, I was analyzing what those stakes are and thinking about The Devil Wears Prada, which, you know, lots of people have seen the movie, but it was a book before that. A really good book.

[JH] In that, she’s working this awful job in this magazine with this terrible boss. And if she could just walk away, and if she had a cushty job elsewhere that was on offer, or a partner earning loads of money where she didn’t need to work, then the stakes of that situation would completely dispel, and it wouldn’t be such a problem anymore.

But what you need to have is, you know, she’s late on her rent, and she’s been trying for years to get a job, and this is the one place that has offered her something. And so you raise the stakes really high by making it really clear why she can’t just walk away from that situation. And she has to make it work despite the fact that she’s absolutely hating every single day she’s going into the office.

[KR] And then, in fact, she’s such a workaholic that she loses her boyfriend. So then work is even more important because it’s sort of everything.

[JH] Yeah. She feels like she’s risked it all, so she can’t then turn back.

[KR] She’s going to plow on. That’s a good one.

Another really good way—almost a hack, really—is if you put someone in a situation where they actually can’t leave physically. That can be really effective. We’ve got Agatha Christie to thank for that subgenre, almost, of the closed circle mystery or the closed room mystery. And Then There Were None is probably her favorite of mine. And I think it’s so effective because it’s on this island, and they literally can’t leave. Even as people are getting picked off, one by one, they can’t go. An easy way to do it.

[JH] Yeah, a really great hack!

[KR] The other thing I was thinking of—which is not unlike what you were saying with The Devil Wears Prada and Andy not wanting to lose the opportunity of this dream job—is going back to character. If ever in doubt, go back to character. It’s that somebody who might have a moral obligation to stay put. So, something like an older sibling who’s desperate to leave home and they’ve got a little brother or sister who’s living in this horrible environment, and they don’t want to leave them to the clutches of their horrible father or something. That’s something the reader can immediately understand and won’t get frustrated with because they understand completely why they would never leave.

[JH] I love that.

Introduce an antagonist

[KR] Another point that sounds simple and obvious on the surface, but I think particularly for people not writing in crime and thriller and suspense might not think of, is to introduce an antagonist. It’s so good at raising the stakes, and there are different ways of approaching it.

You can have a straightforward baddie, somebody who is an actual person who’s making things difficult. But also, you can look at it in a more kind of lateral way, of people being their own worst enemy. If it’s coming from within, that can be really compelling and quite deep and psychological.

One of my favorite books ever is The Remains of the Day  by Kazuo Ishiguro. And Stevens, the butler—actually, the antagonist there, I guess you could say, is the English class system in many ways—but actually, it’s also his own repression. He can never have a proper relationship with anyone because he’s so repressed.

[JH] And you can’t leave yourself, you know?

[KR] No.

[JH] You can’t get rid of that antagonist just by running away!

[KR] You can never escape yourself.

There are different ways of approaching [an antagonist]. You can have a straightforward baddie, somebody who is an actual person who’s making things difficult. But also, you can look at it in a more kind of lateral way, of people being their own worst enemy. If it’s coming from within, that can be really compelling and quite deep and psychological.
—Kate Riordan

‍[JH] I was trying to think of examples of interesting antagonists, and one of them is My Sister, the Serial Killer, where, in many ways, her sister is the antagonist. She’s going around killing men. And that’s what the main character then has to try and resolve, but because she’s her sister, and her goal is to help her sister and to cover up her crimes and make sure she doesn’t lose her sister... Although she’s the antagonist, she’s totally trapped by her, in that she can’t just call the police. She has to continue on through the awful crimes that she’s committing. And it raises the stakes much more than the classic antagonist, perhaps, because she can’t get rid of her. The answer can’t be: just call the police.

[KR] Yeah. And she has become almost an accessory herself to the crimes by not saying anything. That’s a bit like the first point, as well. A lot of these overlap and build on each other, I think. And if you do all of them, you’ll really have high stakes.

[JH] It’s also about ratcheting it up, bit by bit. So it might start off that her sister is the person that’s killed someone, but as she gets more and more complicit in the crimes, then...

[KR] The stakes get higher and higher because she can’t just turn herself in. It’s that point of no return, something that kept cropping up as a phrase in my head. So, you don’t even necessarily start with some stakes and then just keep those. Like you say, that ratcheting-up and layering it on and making it as difficult as possible for your hero, your main character, is really, really effective.

So it could be that when they first do something bad, they could maybe turn themselves in and walk away from the problem, but bit by bit, it gets deeper and deeper into the problem to the point where they can’t see where they could turn anymore. 

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Emotional stakes

[JH] I came up with another one: to consider the emotional stakes as much as the story stakes. An example I came up with, a bit of a crude example, is of a bomb being set in a classroom. That feels like really obvious stakes. There’s children in the classroom, your main character could be a kind of bomb disposal man, and he needs to come in and, you know, detonate this bomb or stop it going off.

And that feels high stakes, but what you could do to ramp that up even further is really explore his emotional stakes in the story. So, could it be that one of the children in the room is his fiancé’s child? Or could it be that he lost a child of his own when he was younger, and he promised that he would make sure no other parent would ever go through that same thing again?

Really work out what within that character specifically is going to pull them through and make them the perfect person for this story, and also mean that it’s not just about the collateral damage within the story—it’s about the personal stakes for them.

Really work out what within that character specifically is going to pull them through and make them the perfect person for this story, and also mean that it’s not just about the collateral damage within the story—it’s about the personal stakes for them.
—Josie Humber

‍[KR] Yeah. I actually think, as humans and as readers, I think it’s really difficult to not have a personal story. I think it’s very difficult to identify with something when it isn’t at that emotional, human individual level. We want our readers to walk in our main character’s shoes and empathize. And I actually think it’s very difficult to do that when it’s very large, external sort of stakes. You know, we need to put ourselves in that position—if it was our child who was in a classroom that had been locked down.

[JH] Yeah.

[KR] One of the things I was thinking of is, if you watch the news, how often they will home in on an individual story. To really kind of bring it home to people. Because we all get inured to horrible stats about people being killed in parts of the world, but actually, they will often follow a particular father who’s looking for his child or whatever it is. And that’s a fiction trick, really.

[KR] I thought of The Kite Runner, which is one of the Hero Books we use at The Novelry as a technical guide. When I coach historical fiction students, it’s really interesting how often they’re so worried about getting the backdrop right and getting their research right that they lose sight of the emotional stakes and the internal stakes. And their characters often are a bit cipher-like. They’re a bit two-dimensional, a bit cardboardy, because they’re so busy thinking: now, when did that happen in World War II?

[JH] Yeah. It can start to feel like the history is happening to them rather than because of them.

[KR] Yes. And that’s an agency problem, which is another thing you are always looking out for as an editor, is characters that are just being buffeted about. They’ve got no agency.

[JH] You’re right. It needs to be the personal stakes within that wider situation. That’s what you are going to remember long after the book’s finished.

[KR] With The Kite Runner, you know, that is a beautiful portrayal of a particularly difficult period of time in Afghanistan. But what I took away from it, if I’m honest, was that it really made me cry—that story about friends, and father and son. It was that emotional connection. 

Create an unlikely hero

[KR] Sometimes, our writers will come up with a great premise or a great hook, and we’re all for that. And that’s really what publishers tend to be looking for.

[JH] It’s what I talk about all the time. You need to find a hook. Otherwise, it’s just really difficult to make a book work in publishing—to be able to find readers for it—if you can’t describe it in that single hooky sentence.

[KR] Which I know lots of writers find a bit dispiriting. But what’s fun and what gets you back to that kind of craft stuff that we love as writers, and the character stuff, is to actually take your premise and then think about the main character being somebody who is so ill-suited to coping with that particular situation. That will raise the stakes for you.

Rebecca is a great example. I love Rebecca. It’s one of my favorite books ever.

[JH, laughing] I reference Rebecca all the time.

[KR] I  reference Rebecca all the time! Lots of people use it as their Hero Book. And that’s a great example, because the second Mrs. De Winter is so colorless and gauche and naive, and she’s thrown into this situation. A reasonably confident woman who’s dealing with the idea of this first wife who was so much more glamorous—it doesn’t hit as hard. That basic premise, which is so strong, about ‘second wife is haunted by first wife’ is great anyway. But you add in the fact that Rebecca is gorgeous and charismatic, and the second Mrs. De Winter isn’t even given a name— [Josie laughing] —is the very opposite of that.

And she doesn’t have any friends in the world, so she has everything to lose. Your stakes are huge. And I think that, along with the amazing atmosphere and that hook, is one of the reasons that book has survived so long.

[JH] Yeah. One thing you can do when you’re looking for your hook is, you know, you’ve got your interesting premise, but then try to find that one character who would be the absolute worst-suited for that premise you’re putting them in. And I was thinking about The Rosie Project  for this. 

[KR] Oh yes.

[JH] The main character wants to find a wife, but he’s going about what should be love and romance in a really clinical way, where he’s creating spreadsheets and quizzes. So, in many ways, he seems like he’s the worst character in the world to be put in these circumstances. But if he wasn’t—if he was a suave guy who’s had loads of relationships and can easily get a woman, that would take all the stakes out of the story. It wouldn’t even be a story.

[KR] And there’d be no humor in it, either. It’s a really funny book, and touching, and that would all be lost.

[JH] Yeah. So, you’re putting this character in a situation that they’re so ill-suited for. You really want to get behind them and you want them to succeed, which is a huge way of making a book compelling: getting your reader behind your main character.

[KR] That’s very true. The other example I was thinking of, going back to psychological suspense—because I think that works really well with this method of premise first and then retrofitting your character—is Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn, which is obviously a massive seller, as well. It’s got a really strong hook: woman fakes her own death to frame her cheating husband for murder.

[KR] But if you look at Amy Dunne as a character who has always been spoiled—she’s her parents’ muse, she’s had a children’s book series written about her, she’s Amazing Amy. And what he does in their marriage is take her out to the sticks and then he starts cheating on her with a younger model. So, she’s made to feel ordinary and she’s not amazing anymore. And the rage that comes from that, I think, really helps with that motivation of her character. Because she does this crazy thing, but it’s pulled off because, actually, it’s completely believable. That’s using character to really—

[JH] It seems like you’re really on Amy’s side here. [Both laughing]

[KR] Yeah! No, I found it really difficult to not like her. She’s desperately unlikable. And with that hapless husband...

[JH] And he is also an example of a character being put in a situation they’re totally ill-suited for. Because he is incredibly hapless, and suddenly he’s having to try and prove that he’s not killed his wife, and he doesn’t know the first thing about how to go about doing that. He is making all the mistakes of, you know, he smiles at a press conference or something like that. He is making wrong moves at every turn, and it’s almost like she knew that he would be doing these wrong moves at every turn, and she knew exactly how she was going to get him. Such a good book.

[KR] I know. I love that book.

You’re putting this character in a situation that they’re so ill-suited for. You really want to get behind them and you want them to succeed, which is a huge way of making a book compelling: getting your reader behind your main character.
—Josie Humber

Add a ticking time bomb

[JH] The final hack we came up with was to add a ticking time bomb into your narrative. I mean, it does feel like a bit of a hack; it sounds almost a bit silly, but you can do it very much as a metaphor. It doesn’t need to be actually putting a bomb into your manuscript and waiting for it to go off while there’s a romcom going on. 

I was trying to think of examples of this that are not thriller-related, and the one I came up with, to take it out of the book world for a second, is My Best Friend’s Wedding with Julia Roberts. On the surface, that could be quite a boring story about a woman who realizes that her best friend is actually the one she wants to be with.

But where all the drama and stakes come into it are that when she goes to tell him that, he says: oh no, I need to go first. And he announces that he’s engaged and that he’s going to be getting married in a week’s time. So suddenly you have this one week—maybe it’s even a few days—timeframe, this ticking time bomb down to this wedding where Julia Roberts has to try and stop this wedding and find a way to tell him that she loves him. And if it wasn’t for that impetus and that very set date of the wedding, it would be kind of boring. She could do it next week. She could wait for the perfect time. So it gives you that situation where she can’t wait for the perfect time. She has to do it in these kind of crazy situations.

[KR] I also think it really controls your narrative as a writer. It’s so scary, starting that first draft. And if you’ve got that built in, then actually, you’ve got a really good roadmap. It’s like:

• Day One
• Day Two
• The Day Before the Wedding

So you don’t get that sprawl, which I think really freaks a lot of new writers out. 

[JH] Yeah. And I love that in a manuscript, where you see: Day One.  Or you see 7 Days Until It Happens  at the top of a chapter. That can be a really good hack.

[KR] Yeah, that’s a really good hack. I did it myself in one of my books, The Stranger. I had a prologue, and then the rest of the book is in flashback, counted down to that prologue. So there was a body found drowned on the beach, and then it was: 7 Weeks Before Diana Goes Missing. So, all the time, it’s just background stress for the reader. In a good way.

[JH, laughing] In a really good way!

[KR] So, have a look at your book and if there’s any way you can tighten it up, or it could just be the chapter headers. That’s what I did. I thought: yeah, I can totally do this, and it’s going to add this sense of urgency and momentum and propel readers through.  And they won’t even consciously realize, in a way. So it does a lot of work for you.

[JH] Yeah. If you can add anything into the manuscript where it’s that this thing has to happen by a certain date, then it means everything gets ramped up a gear, because no one’s prepared. Everyone has to be running around trying to make sure that happens by that date. Oh, Three Hours by...

[KR] Rosamund Lupton. For those who haven’t read it, it’s about a school siege where everything’s locked down, and it literally takes place over three hours. And the way she does it is she moves POVs a lot. So you end up really invested in various groups of people who can’t get to each other. And it’s really tense. It’s tense and emotional.

[JH] And literally, the whole hook is: this takes place in three hours. You are going to be tense for the entire reading experience, because we’re going to be taking you step-by-step through the school siege. It really amplifies those stakes in a way that, if you didn’t have that very specific end in sight, then it might feel a little bit more meandering.

[KR] Yeah, might meander a bit. I think I read that in one sitting, and it was partly that I almost read it in real time, which was amazing. I’m thinking of 24 now, the TV series! But I think that if you can somehow work that in, it pays dividends.

[JH] I think that’s all the tips we’ve got.

[KR] Yeah. I think that’s all the tips we need! [Both laughing]

Closing words

[Louise Dean] Thank you for joining us today. We are so pleased to have you along for the writing journey, and we hope to see you on another episode of The Novelry on Writing.

If you’d like to learn more, visit us at thenovelry.com. From first draft to finished manuscript, at The Novelry you’ll enjoy one-to-one coaching from bestselling authors, live writing classes with award-winning authors and literary agents, and you’ll work with a publishing editor all the way for submission to literary agents toward a publishing deal.

All writers learn from other writers, even the greats. Write your novel in good company. Join us at The Novelry.

We’ll show you how to start, coax your story into shape, and cheer you on to type The End.

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