Raising the Stakes

Are you sure he wasn't referring to the query rather than the initial pages?

What are the current stakes in the query, and in the 5-10 pages?

Personally, I wouldn't interpret that feedback as meaning the stakes are too low. The agent could mean that the conflict was too simplistic. Good conflict has layers and dimensions.

BethS said:

Personally, I wouldn't interpret that feedback as meaning the stakes are too low. The agent could mean that the conflict was too simplistic. Good conflict has layers and dimensions.

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This was my reaction, too. It could be the stakes, it could be the motivation in the opening, could be theme.

Try to look for trends. Words like "nuance" are subjective, and sometimes a story just won't click with a given agent. That's okay, we all have our tastes. If you hear variations on that same line from 3-5 different agents, that's a good sign there's something bigger there.

I'm confused. Did the agent say this based on reading the full manuscript or just the query and first pages?

popmuze said:

I got a note from an agent who said he didn't find the conflict in my book "nuanced" enough to hold his attention. I'm interpreting that as meaning the stakes may be too low. How do you raise the stakes in the first five to ten pages?

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Can you explain the full situation and give us their exact wording?

My interpretation of this is: I don't know how you got the notion of raising the stakes when they said conflict. If they said "not nuanced enough" then it sounds like you don't have strong enough conflict that surfaces. Your conflict is either too subtle or non-existent. Conflict happens between the forces challenging each other.

popmuze said:

That sounds about right. How do you layer the conflict in the first chapter or two?

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For me, you want to get some sort of conflict that isn't rooted entirely in present action. This is, uh, hard to explain. I kind of know it when I see it? But what I tend to see a lot is conflict that's very external--so maybe the main character is threatened by mob hitmen or something and has to run. That might carry me for a page or two, but over that page I want to start to see some idea of why your MC is there, why he's running, why he's doing what he's doing, etc. Those things should start to hint at more underlying conflict in the character or in the broader situation. It's a tricky balance, and usually achieved by a combination of really tight writing and really careful decisions on what to put into immediate detail, what gets mentioned in summary, and what comes out in internal monologue/voice/narration.

There's really no formula for a good opener or good conflict. There needs to be some sort of immediate hook, but even that can take a lot of forms and one can usually tell a good writer when he or she gets that into the first five or ten words, not pages.

It's hard to nail openers down, though. Have you posted in your first chapter in SYW? People there can give you at the very least an idea where their interest is fading and often they can suggest some ways to increase the pace and tighten the writing so you get more story into those first few pages.

Sorry, I meant did he request the full.

There's also the issue of agents having a few slightly more specific stock phrases they use when rejecting partials and fulls. I discovered that on Query Tracker. This *could* be one of those.

popmuze said:

I guess my question is what's the difference between the stakes and the conflict and how do I make them both very clear from the beginning.

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When writing your query letter you should have run across the line: "What happens if s/he fails to get what she wants?" That's the stakes. What does your character gamble with? What do they put up, either directly or indirectly, to achieve their goals? The Prince wishes to save his love from the Big Bad Guy, and he's willing to put his life and honor on the line to do so. That end part is the stakes.

Conflict is the events that happen between the Prince and the Big Bad Guy. Sometimes you might not present early enough conflict, sometimes you might not present strong enough latent conflict to generate interest. What's the summary of the opening conflict in your story?

popmuze said:

In Chapter two it turns out he's been tracked for years by a scientist at the university who has developed a way to send him back in time to change any three days out of his life. His first choice is to go back to the day his father was killed and attempt to prevent it.

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That's your story. Everything else is fluff I don't care about.

-cb

popmuze said:

A once gifted teenage boy, living with his lonely and depressed alcoholic mother, has been fantasizing for the past ten years that his father will return for him and change his life. When he finds out (on page two) that the father has been found dead, he loses what was left of his diminishing motivation, quits the track team, messes up his SATs, and nearly drops out of school. At the end of chapter one he's offered a scholarship at a nearby university for a seminar on how to ace the SATs. In Chapter two it turns out he's been tracked for years by a scientist at the university who has developed a way to send him back in time to change any three days out of his life. His first choice is to go back to the day his father was killed and attempt to prevent it.

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I can't tell you with 100% certainty without reading the actual writing, but I would agree that the story seems to start in the second chapter. His father's death creates a lot of conflict, but that downward spiral of failures might not be so interesting and doesn't leave the reader with much to hope for in this character's life. The second chapter involves a interesting element with the character doing something, and already brings about the backstory and lead up to what their situation was.

What have your beta-readers said about this? Because there's little use worrying over something that a single agent and I say when they've read it.

I also see that you haven't posted in the SYW section for a while so perhaps if you feel very unsure, you can post your first chapter (and/or the second) to see what folks think.

I haven't read your manuscript, so it's impossible for me to say anything for sure, but a lack of "nuance" doesn't sound to me like it's necessarily a matter of there not being enough at stake.

When I hear "nuance" I think--and again, I haven't read the MS in question, I have no knowledge whatsoever about your talent as a writer, so this could be totally off-base--about a lot of fiction written by beginners that lacks a certain degree of moral complexity. The bad guys are real bad and the good guys are angelic.

How is the first chapter advancing the story? More precisely, how is his depression and his lonely alcoholic mother is going to affect the story later on?

I'm guessing not at all. You could remove all the first chapter melodrama and the story would unfold intact.

You want to show how he's bright and not on top of his game at the same time? Having him do something brilliantly stupid (like fabricate some remote-controlled camera he uses to get proof the girls are smoking in their bathrooms) from the POV of the scientists.

-cb

popmuze said:

I got a note from an agent who said he didn't find the conflict in my book "nuanced" enough to hold his attention. I'm interpreting that as meaning the stakes may be too low. How do you raise the stakes in the first five to ten pages?

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I'm not sure what "nuanced" means without getting inside the agent's head, but I would never connect it to stakes being too low. How did you make that analogy? "Nuanced" means "a subtle difference", or "subtlety". If I used that word as an editor, I would mean that everything is too blunt, too out in the open, and there are no subtle motives and/or actions/or complications that make the reader think, that make the reader wonder what'd really going on, and what will happen next.

popmuze said:

That sounds about right. How do you layer the conflict in the first chapter or two?

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In the first chapter or two, you should be introducing conflicts. They'll grow more complex (layered) as the story progresses, but they should start out being intriguing enough to make the reader want to keep reading to find out what happens.

If the agent only read a few pages, then I can only guess that maybe he or she found the conflict(s) not properly motivated or too simple or possibly even dull. It's really impossible to say for sure.

ETA:

I didn't get the feeling this guy read more than 10-20 pages.

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But you sent him the whole manuscript?

Sounds like he at least read far enough to see that the conflicts were not developing as they should. Once again, that's a guess.