Imagine a story where a secret agent is asked to find the kidnapped son of an intelligence official. An exciting scenario, right? But halfway into the story, we realize not only does our protagonist need to find the son, he needs to stop him from unintentionally unleashing a secretly-implanted supervirus. Ratchets up the tension, doesn’t it? As you probably guessed, I didn’t just make this up. This is the plot of 2002 classic sci-fi thriller, Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever. But I use it only to show how important raising the stakes are to your story.

So, what do we mean when we say “Raise the stakes?” Stakes are something gained or lost in the character’s pursuit of a goal; they are potential consequences. This phrase comes from Dracula, where the raising of the “stake” to kill the head vampire was the climax of the story.

Think of stakes as “If…, then…” statements. If Ahab doesn’t kill Moby Dick, many people won’t have oil to burn their lanterns. If Gatsby doesn’t earn enough money, the poor won’t have anyone to aspire to. Or in my 2011 sci-fi thriller Naptime, if John Crater, after getting injected with an experimental serum, doesn’t get at least eight hours of sleep each night, his heart will stop.

There are three kinds of stakes: external stakes, internal stakes, and post-ternal stakes. Let’s take a glance at each one. External stakes refers to what’s happening in the world around your characters. Perhaps an asteroid the size of Nauru is headed toward the Earth or perhaps your character has a big test on obscure island nations that he needs to pass to graduate high school.

Internal stakes are the emotional impacts of a success or failure. They are what fuels the character to pursue their goals. Revenge is a big one. As is love. In the Count of Monte Cristo, it’s the thought of living in a world where injustice isn’t resolved. In legendary Denver Broncos placekicker Jason Elam’s Monday Night Jihad, it’s giving up the sport you love to stop the terrorists from destroying America.

For the sake of brevity, I’ll just say that post-ternal stakes are the stakes for the reader if they don’t finish the story. Confusion, blue balls, or a dearth of knowledge regarding the dangers of radon are all common post-ternal stakes. If your reader isn’t experiencing anything like this after they stop reading your book, it’s most likely your stakes aren’t high enough.

Here are a few steps you can take to ensure you’re raising the stakes correctly.

Step One: Add a Ticking Clock

A lot of people ask me, John, how can I raise the stakes in my writing. Well, you can always start by adding a ticking clock. Your character doesn’t have to be aware of a time limit but your reader should be. There should be some time frame in which the character needs to achieve their goal. It doesn’t have to be a clock, obviously. You could use an egg timer, a stopwatch, an hourglass, a Chippendales calendar, a sundial, a marine chronometer, or the photon absorption by transitions between the two hyperfine ground states of caesium-133 atoms 

Or find other ways to indicate a time limit. If you’re writing a thriller, trap your characters in a place where, if they don’t leave soon, they’ll never make it out alive. Like Baltimore.

Step Two: Combine internal and external stakes

Create scenarios in which your character has stakes in multiple-levels. In the Lord of the Rings, the external stakes for Frodo is that if he doesn’t destroy the ring, all of Middle Earth will fall into darkness. But on a personal level, if he doesn’t set off on this quest, people will realize how gay he is.

To give another example, if your character is trying to defuse a bomb in an elementary school, maybe focus on the guilt they still feel about all those bombs they made in their young and wild years.  

Step Three: Proportionality matters

Not all books need to escalate to world-ending stakes. It should escalate in proportion with your characters and the goals you’ve set up for them. If it’s a coming of age story set in a small town, you could go with this: If we don’t raise enough money, they’re going to tear down this teen rec center and turn it into a wildlife refuge. In one short story I wrote called “Action News” the stakes were simply whether or not an all-male local news broadcast team would have good ratings.

Step Four: Don’t forget about positive consequences

So far, we’ve focused on negative consequences, what a character risks losing. But we can’t forget why we want our reader to root for our characters. Getting laid is a great option. As readers, your audience is likely undesirable and sexually dormant and therefore rely on books for satisfaction.

Step Five: Create moral no-win scenarios

These are some of the most compelling scenarios in all of fiction. Put your characters in awkward situations where, no matter what they chose, something bad will happen. You could write about a New York City cop who’s torn between maintaining a vibrant, diverse community with lots of great authentic ethnic cuisines and terrorizing minorities like all his experience and training has told him to. Or you could do something like Batman, where he has to decide whether or not keeping the streets of Gotham safe justifies brainwashing and sexually enslaving a young man to help him do it.