by Erik Bork
In detective stories, someone has already died, usually, so it’s often not that someone’s life is actively under threat all throughout the story. But there’s a killer or killers on the loose, and justice needs to be served, so the stakes are still high. There’s a reason why crime thrillers and TV shows are almost never about lesser crimes than murder (or perhaps kidnapping or torture): the stakes just aren’t as high. It’s hard to get an audience to stay glued to their seats (or turning pages) over the challenges of bringing to justice a burglar or an embezzler or someone who committed a non-deadly assault. In the real world, if any of these things happened to us or our loved ones, of course we would care deeply. But in the world of stories that we watch for entertainment, such lesser crimes—either preventing them or solving them—just aren’t big enough to command an audience’s investment. And the same is true of other lesser threats to one’s physical well-being, such as injuries or illnesses. There is nothing like the potential loss of life to get people’s attention—and nothing like someone risking their life and/or fighting against those who would take lives, to get an audience on board with some excitement.
I can’t emphasize enough, however, that life can’t just be potentially at stake, or only at stake at the climax. In an action or horror script, for example, there must be action and horror (with life-and-death stakes) all throughout the story. Yes, it should build to its apex in the final act, but if the biggest stakes aren’t actively at play until then, we haven’t really passed the “stakes test” for our story idea. And as we saw in the Punishing chapter, this is a very common problem with scripts—not having a big enough, “high stakes enough” challenge until very late in the movie. Or having “potential” life stakes, but with nothing actively threatening (or even taking) lives throughout most of the story.
Another problem I sometimes see is a story where most of the stakes are smaller, but life-and-death stakes are introduced at some point, changing the tone and even the genre in a sudden way. This makes everything else that people were concerned about before seem trivial by comparison. Whenever life is at stake, nobody will care about anything else until that is resolved. Nothing else will seem important enough to spend their time and attention on.
Psychologist Abraham Maslow’s pyramid of human needs speaks to this. Survival comes first, at the bottom of the pyramid. If survival is threatened, one can’t even think about higher needs like love, belonging, and purpose. First, survival has to be handled. It’s the same in stories. “Death stakes” are a powerful tool and should be handled carefully. Usually, if they’re going to be present, they have to be present throughout, in a genre where that is appropriate, tonally, and where we’re not trying to get the audience to primarily care about something else of lower stakes.
Assuming we can avoid those pitfalls, life-and-death stakes allows us to check off “life-altering” as one of the seven key criteria for the story idea. What could be more life-altering than losing life altogether? Nothing.
Everything Else
What if we’re not writing in the kind of genre or story situation where actual lives are taken or threatened? Most people who aspire to write aren’t. They’re writing dramas or comedies, typically, where characters have problems, but potential death isn’t really on the table. What then?
We have to make sure that what is on the table is still somehow big enough. The good news is that in a comedy or drama, nobody expects life-and-death battles, with heart-pounding action and suspense. But for them to care enough to engage with our story, they need something else that feels almost as big, consistent with our genre.
What could be almost as big as “life-and-death”?
Great story ideas focus on something that threatens to alter lives for the negative in a massive and unrecoverable way. (Or promises to change them for the better in just as significant of a way, if the story goal is reached.)
What’s ideal is if it seems like the main character’s life (and maybe the lives of others they’re trying to help) could essentially be destroyed, even if not literally. So, their chance at happiness, success, and living the life they seem destined to live is all on the line.
Most successful stories usually put one of the following outcomes at risk, in descending order from highest to lowest stakes:
Life itself.
As discussed, this can range from the fate of all humanity (Armageddon) to a single individual (Gravity).
Justice for horrible crimes and prevention of future crimes.
This covers investigative stories where someone has been killed (48 Hrs., Zodiac, Chinatown) or hurt in some other very significant way (Spotlight, Erin Brockovich). Ideally, it’s fun to watch the hero(es) try to get to the bottom of things.
Freedom/individual autonomy.
The audience feels that characters are trapped in a terrible situation and roots for their escape/release. This encompasses the most severe dramatic situations (12 Years a Slave), lighter, more comedic versions of “bondage” (Office Space), and everything in between (One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest).
Keeping one’s family/way of life.
This can involve returning to one’s home safely, as in The Wizard of Oz, Finding Nemo, or even Planes, Trains and Automobiles. It can also work if something threatens to break up one’s cherished life situation (Gone with the Wind, Toy Story, Mrs. Doubtfire). Audiences relate to having all that one holds dear threatened or turned upside down. Isn’t this close to losing life itself, emotionally speaking?
Being able to happily move forward with one’s ideal life partner.
In any story where the main thing the audience is asked to root for is a relationship working out, we’ve got to put something huge in the way of the relationship, right from the beginning, which doesn’t get solved until the very end, if at all. That “thing in the way” has to be external—not just the main character’s inner blocks to having a relationship. There has to be a big reason staring them in the face why there’s no way this will work—like one of them is a vampire or a mermaid. Or maybe one is already spoken for. Or their families are at war. Or they are rivals, even enemies, in some other way.
As Save the Cat! says in describing this kind of story (which it calls “Buddy Love”), the audience has to really see that these two are each other’s perfect partners, such that their best chance at happiness will be lost if they don’t end up together. The tone can range from serious and dramatic (Brokeback Mountain) to extremely light (Wedding Crashers).
Winning a much better and deserved professional life and future prospects.
This is a tricky one, because most stories that are only about someone succeeding at a particular job do not feel “high stakes” enough to an audience. Jobs alone often don’t feel primal and visceral, because one can always get another job. Even in stories about one trying to have their ideal job, if the only negative stakes are not having it, well, most of us don’t have that. They’ll live.
To make career stakes work, it has to seem like a character has everything on the line, and their entire future path and happiness will be determined by whether one particular “career” opportunity works out or not. They usually need to come off as both morally better than others in that career who would keep them down and unjustly handicapped in their life situation, in one form or another. Thus, we have certain rare stories that are all about a “career pursuit,” such as The Pursuit of Happyness, Working Girl, and Jerry Maguire.
Reaching an important prize that could change one’s life and self-definition, which a lot has been sacrificed for.
This is often seen in “sports movies” like Rudy, Rocky, or The Bad News Bears, where the sports goal is really about something bigger and deeper for the main character and others, where we feel they will be forever changed for the better if they can rise to the occasion (and may be stuck in a really dismal life if they can’t). It’s not that the sports victory itself matters so much or is so compelling. It’s what it represents, and what’s on the line for
the character (and other team members) beyond the sport. We could put The 40-Year-Old Virgin in this same category. Losing his virginity in the right way, with the right person, is something that the main character has to do to be able to move forward into a better life.
A chance at happiness (which life circumstances threaten).
This is another one that is easy to abuse or misunderstand. Obviously, all characters and all people want to be happy—and happiness is an internal state, even an internal choice. So, for this to work as story stakes, one generally has to externalize the situation somehow and make it seem, again, like the character’s one real chance at a decent and happy life is on the line in the story. Somehow their happiness or chance at it seems to be greatly compromised, and it’s reflected in their life circumstances and relationships, in such a way that the audience wants them to fix it—as in Ordinary People, Sideways, or Inside Out. (Note how the latter really goes out of its way to externalize this otherwise internal problem.)
These types of stakes have worked, over and over again, in successful stories. Often stories stumble because they offer only stakes that don’t quite make this list and don’t feel big enough. Such as:
Any achievement (regardless of how difficult and time-consuming it might be) that isn’t hugely life-changing for the main character and/or others who will follow.
We need to see how the lives of people we care about will significantly change because of it (and in the pursuit of it)—and be unthinkably better or worse as a result. That’s what matters—not just the achievement itself.
A job or career success—unless it’s a life-changingly important job that definitely cannot and will not ever be available elsewhere.
Job/financial success in and of itself will tend not to move an audience (and might even seem trivial or selfish), if nothing bigger is at stake.
Learning something or changing some inner attitude, belief, or personal quality.
Too internal. Can work well, though, when combined with high external stakes.
Military battles within a larger conflict, which don’t represent one cohesive “mission” of great emotional importance to the audience.
War stories generally work better when they’re focused on a specific mission with very clear and important stakes to the audience, or are personal stories about the difficulties and costs of life at war. Ongoing “unit histories” or movies about a series of battles or battles within a war that the audience doesn’t have a clear rooting interest in tend to be hard to get an audience excited about.
Generalized happiness or well-being, with no specific and significant external life change.
Happiness is always the goal, but audiences seem to need characters battling against hugely difficult external circumstances in pursuit of a measurable goal. The internal state or choice known as happiness is too vague and hard to dramatize to sustain a story on its own.
A single decision or inner growth that needs to happen.
Loglines sometimes focus too much on what a character “must decide,” “must learn,” or “must become.” These are all internal. While it’s true that a character often must rise up internally in order to confront the external story challenge, in the end, the core of the story idea is that outer challenge. Any internal “musts” need to be preceded by, followed by, or otherwise infused with a challenging external gauntlet of some sort that meets the criteria listed earlier.
An unsympathetic person becoming a better person (or pursuing an unsympathetic goal).
As we talked about in the Relatable chapter, audiences generally won’t be hooked into caring about and wanting to follow an unsympathetic character in the first act, even if they are going to eventually change.
Characters Dealing with Their Stuff
“Life-altering” also refers to what the main character has to go through in order to resolve whatever challenge is at the heart of the story. Part of the reason we need a big, punishing, external difficulty is that it forces the main character out of their comfort zone and into a situation that will test them, grow them, and perhaps change them in fundamental ways. They will never be the same again for having gone through what they went through in this story.
That’s why it’s important that whatever they’re facing is a unique, even once-in-a-lifetime sort of challenge that they’ve never faced before and that will require them to do things and access capacities within themselves that they’ve never had to do or access before. Usually characters are in a foreign world or situation during the long middle section of a story, one in which they are an overmatched underdog trying to figure out how to get through it.
Stories are not about normal life, when characters do their normal things in a normal way. Stories are about extraordinary journeys that characters go on because they feel they have no choice. Something so pressing and impactful is happening or has happened that they have only this one option.
Often a hero is reluctant at first, because none of us really wants to have our life severely altered, where a lot is on the line and the outcome is far from certain (and in fact, it even seems likely we’ll fail, in most stories). We also tend to have a certain inertia. We might not be completely fulfilled in our current lives, and might even be rather frustrated, but that doesn’t mean we’re willing to take some big chance. The main characters of stories are the same. Something has to jolt them, and really rock their world, in order to force them to take a leap into some major challenge. That’s what the catalyst does.
But the problem is that they tend to rely on their old ways of doing things, of seeing the world and themselves, in the new world of the story. And this doesn’t work. But that won’t last forever. The story will force them to change that. In fact, that’s the whole point of many stories. They alter the character, both externally and internally, so that at the end, they aren’t quite the same as what they were. And usually this is a satisfying alteration, one that made the whole gauntlet worth it. The audience gets to go on that journey with the character, and even be inspired by the (usually) positive change they have witnessed.
In most successful scripts, the main character grows out of whatever was most limiting about themselves and their approach to life at the beginning of the story—but only because the story’s external challenges force them to. Characters—just like us—don’t willingly question or change their internal dynamics. They only do so when they have no other choice. Even characters who have the most room for growth don’t make “growing internally” their primary goal in a story. In fact, they more likely resist any seeming pressure to grow. They try to approach the story problem without changing internally. But this doesn’t work. And so, we typically see them fail, to the point where everything seems hopeless, about three-quarters of the way into a story.
Only in the final quarter does the main character have one last chance to battle for the result they want. And this battle typically involves some level of personal change on their part, some growth that is meaningful that they will take with them through the rest of their lives, beyond this story. And that’s what makes the story really impactful—to character and audience.
Unmet Needs and Wants
I think of a good story as being about the most difficult and important thing its main character ever went through, which changed their life forever. That’s generally true of feature films, novels, and plays. In some cases, you could say it’s true about a television series as a whole, if you add up all the episodes and seasons. But in TV, it’s more useful to think of “story” in terms of the smaller stories that make up individual episodes. And in those, nobody’s overall life and happiness is generally on the line in a permanent way. (Unless it’s the kind of show where series regulars constantly have their lives at stake.)
That doesn’t mean what each character is facing in an episode story isn’t incredibly important to them. It is. It really matters, and it’s all they can think about . . . for the length of that episode. It is also usually representative of somet
hing larger that is crucial to their sense of themselves and their lives (or their life continuing in a happy and healthy direction), and they feel they must resolve it now. It’s just that resolving it doesn’t massively change their lives, in most series. Instead, it takes their lives back to the normal status quo, where most episodes begin and end—which is a life that isn’t quite how they want it to be but isn’t in massive crisis at the moment.
The best characters tend to want something they can’t have, and in a series, they can never really have it, even though it seems vitally important to them. There is something about each character’s life that is fundamentally unsatisfying, and there’s a distant fantasy version of their life that they can never quite reach—but they keep trying to, in small and specific ways that become the focus of episodes.
These “unmet wants” typically stem from some fundamental human desire or need that we all share. And they’re what keep a show going. Each character spends every episode pursuing and grappling with some variation or microcosm of their unmet want. What makes them compelling is that they are also under siege, in some way, by the world around them, and unable to secure that version of their life that they continually wish they had.
On Everybody Loves Raymond, for instance, Ray’s fantasy would be to get to watch sports on TV, have as much sex with his wife as he wants, and never have to be in the middle of conflicts or be asked to up his game as a father and husband. His wife Debra’s fantasy, though, would be to have a husband who does just that—who understands her, helps her, takes her side, and keeps his annoying parents at bay. Neither of them will ever be able to get their fantasy lives. And that is essentially what the show is about—the conflict between that fantasy and their reality. Virtually every story on that series stems from this.