Everyone loves a good steak. Unless you’re vegan. But then I’m sure they like a good stake. Unless they’re a vampire vegan. In which case, I suppose they just starve to death.

Please, for the love of all that is good and dramatic, give your protagonist stakes. Please. I read a lot of works that don’t have stakes and it’s one of those basic things that really stands out when it’s missing.

This is the sibling talk to your protagonist’s wants. We discussed that earlier. Every character wants something. Your protagonist’s want is what motivates them to keep going when they face adversity. It can be anything – money to buy a new Playstation or the love of an emotionally distant mother – but it needs to be something core and primal to the character. The more the protagonist wants this thing, the more the reader will cheer for them to get that.

However, there are two sides to the dramatic coin. Everyone wants something but they’re also afraid of losing something. Those are your stakes. It’s what you’re throwing into the pot during the poker tournament. You can’t just sit at the table, playing for free and taking everyone else’s chips without putting something of yours on the line. Your character’s stakes work alongside their motivation – it keeps them engaged in the narrative, weathering the challenges and setbacks as they build and build to that peak climatic moment. 

It’s this push and pull between wanting more and fearing loss that creates contrast in your protagonist. In many ways, these two desires can be odds and create tension in the character. The stakes can be constantly pulling at the protagonist to drop their ambitious pursuits, testing how much that motivation really means to them. Alternatively, the stakes and motivation can work in tandem, creating a feedback loop that keeps the protagonist picking themselves up after every fall.

You can see both of these in The Hobbit and Lord of the Rings respectively. The Hobbit has Bilbo Baggins joining a bunch of dwarves to travel far from home with the promise of lots of money. Here, the motivation and stakes work against each other. Bilbo is motivated to earn his share of the treasure and prove his worth to Gandalf and the doubtful dwarves of his aptitude. His stakes, however, are the dangers of the road and the abandonment of his rather pedestrian but bucolic home life which he loves back in the Shire. Had he no stakes, perhaps he would have been a homeless orphan who went with the dwarves because what else does he have? But then we would lose much of the internal conflict Bilbo faces in the early chapters where his cowardice – driven by his desire to return to his comfortable life – leads to further complications in the conflict with the trolls and goblins. On the flip side, as the adventure continues, Bilbo learns that he possesses heroism, morality and loyalty in facing impossible odds, assisting his friends to reclaim their home and showing mercy to his enemies when he has defeated them. This gives Bilbo character arc growth and, while the stakes never actually subside, we get to witness his relationship to those stakes change over the course of the narrative.

On the flip side, in Lord of the Rings, Frodo’s motivation is tied to his stakes. Learning the dreadful truth of the One Ring, Frodo realizes that the future of his home, his friends and his way of life are irrevocably tied to destroying this powerful artifact. He cannot be tempted to return home because doing so will invite those seeking the One Ring to come and destroy it. Thus, his motivation – to destroy the Ring and ruin Saroun’s ambitions – is fuelled by his need to protect everyone and everything he loves. As the hardships of the journey mount – as he gets separated from his friends, captured, maimed, hunted and haunted by the lure of power – he and Sam keep speaking fondly of the Shire, what life will be like when they return and how they can put all these horrors behind them when they finally get to enjoy those comforts once again. In this way, the stakes keep feeding the motivation and make the tragic predicament Frodo is in all the more intense.

And that’s what we’re going for here. Stakes and motivation are the emotional bridge that connect our reader empathically to our stories. Everyone has their own wants. Everyone has their own fears. They want to see what the heroes themselves struggle with. They want to understand why they do what they do and why they think what they think. It’s important to provide this for the reader, to draw them further into the inner world of our protagonist and get them invested in the outcome of these fictitious character’s journey.

So, please, please, please provide those juicy ribeyes for us to eat. We need to know what your characters have to lose. Thus, when you’re writing your protagonist:

Ask yourself: what is it that my character fears? What is it that they have to lose by the events of the story? What do they have resting on the line if they fail? Am I communicating this risk clearly to the reader?