Small Stakes in Fantasy

The book I am working through in my head is like that, and while I cannot remember any titles at the moment, I know I have seen other books like that before. It works fine as long as it is well done. (The stakes in my book are one life, also )

I can't remember the title or author sorry.

It's been a while since I've read and it was sort of a fantasy SF mix. A human colony ship was heading toward a new planet. On this new planet were a race of people that could astral projection. It was a normal thing for them. The native girl astral projected herself onto the ship and got stuck there. The human boy figured out that she was slowly dying since she was not in her body and he saved her.

There was this other plot about everyone's auras and how it showed spiritual/emotional sickness and that the humans needed to be healed. The boy's aura was not sick. This did not come until the end of the story it came out slowly during the story. It didn't really get into "your going to take over my race and we'll all die if y'all aren't healed though."

Maybe someone has heard of this story and can give you the title and/or author.

In fantasy, small stakes are best used on small vampires.



Seriously, though, I feel your pain. I always hear that the stakes have to be high. But seriously, how many times can you save the world? And quite honestly, smaller stakes are probably easier to relate to. Remember the first couple of pages of a Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy. It was something like he couldn't wrap his head around the fact that the Earth was destroyed, or even London, but he COULD understand that McDonald's was gone. I would imagine in a YA novel, personal stakes might even be more effective than save-the-world stakes.

I am unpublished, but I think Sage is right. Just make sure whatever the stakes are, the reader is invested.

Wasn't the film Labyrinth about a girl rescuing her baby brother? That's a personal thing, nothing to do with the world ending. I think as long as the conflict is meaningful to the MC, that's the most important part.

You pose an interesting question. And if the question is interesting, the story probably is interesting, as well. Your cleverness will pay off in the end.

Mine combines fantasy with a romantic tragedy. There are no real "stakes", just a story. The whole "quest to save the world" bit I feel has been overdone, and is what really makes fantasy so repetitive. Why can't authors just combine real plots with fantastical elements?

JBI said:

Mine combines fantasy with a romantic tragedy. There are no real "stakes", just a story. The whole "quest to save the world" bit I feel has been overdone, and is what really makes fantasy so repetitive. Why can't authors just combine real plots with fantastical elements?

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Doesn't every story have stakes, though? I mean, that's what drives a story, right? A problem, and how it's solved...? I don't think that stakes need to be really huge and looming in order to qualify as stakes. It could be something as simple as finding out who stole your pen or figuring out whether a particular boy likes you.

My story's stakes almost always start small. Example: Boy has a crush on girl.

Then they usually get a bit more complicated. Example: Girl is a robot.

Then I tack on several subplots. Example: Robot is wanted by giant space lizards for the information in her brain.

Then I expand on the subplots. Example: The information turns out to be the GSL's plans to wipe out the human race.

Then I tie the subplots and starting stake together. Example: Boy and Girl stops the GSL's after a long quest. Through the quest, boy finds the courage to explain his feelings to the girl and she kisses him.

The end!

If you can make the small stakes feel big to the reader (as they doubtless do to the character - it may not be the end of the world, but if your life's on the line, you'll think it's fairly important), then you should be fine. So long as the reader cares about it, they'll keep reading.

TrickyFiction said:

I am writing a YA fantasy in which the stakes are small, by comparison. One person's life is on the line. I wonder, does this work in fantasy? Do any of you know some examples of fantasy (especially YA) with small stakes like that?

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In The Limits of Enchantment by Graham Joyce, the novel is centred around the coming-of-age of the young female protagonist. It is set in the 1960s in England. The main aim for her is to find a way of keeping the cottage in which she grew up, which is being sold by the owner of the land it is on. She is very poor, and needs to raise money to buy the owner out, somehow. The protagonist is a midwife, but an 'unofficial' one, using enchantments in her work. She can't get a job without getting an official certificate, and she can't enrol for that without having state-recognised experience, and magic must be kept secret. At the same time, the woman who has raised her becomes ill, the village she lives in becomes suspicious and hostile towards her and a moment of personal magical significance is on the horizon for her, and she feels overwhelmed by it all. It's a great book, with the magical elements fitting seamlessly in with the very real setting, and the stakes, while never really going beyond her own life, feel important and gripping. I hope this helps you.

well, just about every episode of 'the twilight zone' is a personal story, which is appropriate for the time allotted. for a fantasy novel, it's a lot harder to draw out a personal story over the course of a trilogy, particularly when some people's advice is 'if you can remove the fantasy from your story, do so,' i.e., if the fantasy is merely tacked on props and settings it should be taken away.

i always default to movies for examples because it's more likely something we're all more familiar with, so i give you 'practical magic.' it seems fantasy and romance are the two genres you can combine and come out with a personal story where the fate of the universe doesn't hinge on the outcome. in fact, isn't 'the illiad' rather a personal tale? 'a 1001 nights' is ostensibly a personal tale of scheherazod attempting to spare her life through storytelling, although the tales she tells are the fantasy... that's an odd-ball one depending on how you look at it, i guess.

i've also read several of those dungeons and dragons books, forgotten realms i believe they're called, where the world wasn't on the verge of disaster, although those tended to be more shorter stories woven together to form a larger tale.

of course, greek myths tend to be personal stories, too, but more morality tales. and if you think fables are fantasy, talking animals and the like, well, pick a disney movie. 'animal farm' springs to mind as a serious story, but you've got 'charlotte's web' and just too many to speak of.

dunno, does lemony snickett's count? pry not.

sci-fi-wise, choose an episode of star trek. quite a few are personal stories. i can only imagine how many star trek novels don't involve the ships destruction, tough probably most might have some kind of cheesy doomsday device in there somewhere, lol. but, you know, they only wrote about sixty-three thousand star trek novels, so odds are there has to be *some*, right? (note that they wrote a lot of star wars novels, too, but i can't think of a single one i ever read what didn't feature some galactic overtones.)

suffice it to say there are quite a few fantasy and sci-fi stories out there that aren't on a grand scale. maybe not as many, but they're out there... somewhere. not saying it's a balance of any kind, though. but, as mentioned, if you overlay a sub-genre like romance as a major element and not just as a sub-plot, that can seriously reduce your need for grand scale stories, eh? (i'd like to see some fantasy with a mystery template, something like a gandolf and sherlock holmes mixed character. that would require thought, though, and sadly most thought involved in fantasy comes through in how to put a twist on the standard kill the bad guy ending where the second act is so much fighting crazy monsters. you guys wanna change what's on the bookshelves? find ten good writers with good ideas and ten grand each to invest and start your own publishing company, then get a guy who'll run the whole thing on commission. make sure he runs it well on pain of death, though.)

For me, a story doesn't need to be about saving the world, but it does need to be about saving the MC's world. It can be about something as small as the MC going to the hairdresser's (elven hairdressers for that fantasy feel) and getting a terrible haircut - oh no, but the royal ball is tonight! Now the MC must somehow salvage her terrible haircut before her "world" of being a pretty princess is ruined.

See? The story is about a tiny, insignificant thing.. but it means the world to the MC. That's what "high stakes" mean to me, and yes, I think you do need to have them to make the story compelling.

I have read groans on agent blogs about "another save-the-world" plot. For what it's worth.

That's quite hard for me. I'm writing an end-of-the-world Lord of the Rings style thing based on a few videogames I've played, (won't say which though).

But I do like others which are this type. Sometimes, I find the save the world plot to be a bit too epic.

Sofie said:

For me, a story doesn't need to be about saving the world, but it does need to be about saving the MC's world. It can be about something as small as the MC going to the hairdresser's (elven hairdressers for that fantasy feel) and getting a terrible haircut - oh no, but the royal ball is tonight! Now the MC must somehow salvage her terrible haircut before her "world" of being a pretty princess is ruined.

See? The story is about a tiny, insignificant thing.. but it means the world to the MC. That's what "high stakes" mean to me, and yes, I think you do need to have them to make the story compelling.

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I dunno. There is such a thing as too small.

Current book I'm reading has the characters simply trying to get out of a predicament they don't know how they got into exactly and then there's personal dilemmas to sort out as well. Nothing epic scale in this story and quite frankly, it works great.

I think it depends on the type of fantasy. Epic and Swords & Sorcery fantasy usually have high stakes, but not all fantasy does. I'm working on a story set in a fantasy world, but the entire story takes place in a magic school and the only conflict that occurs is internal conflict among the students. All that is at stake in my story are decisions like to return home or continue going to the school and to love or not to love.

And then of course there are the small stakes that turn out to have larger stakes. Save the cheerleader save the world.*


*I have never seen Heroes, but that quote sounds like the sort of thing I'm talking about. Sort of like "Oh! We have to rescue this princess? No problem. Wait, somehow I'm getting sucked into blowing up a Death Star? That's not what I signed on for."

If the character and the reader both care about a problem, and neither thinks it's stupid, you're okay.

Larger-scale problems are good for motivating groups of characters. Only one or two people are going to care about a bad haircut, but most people care about the imminent end of the world.

One problem with "saving the world/defeating the Dark Lord" plots is that they require the writer to know how worlds, armies, and Dark Lords operate and interconnect. This presents the writer with many, many opportunities to do something the reader will think is dumb, and consequently suffer a loss of the reader's esteem.

Another problem with STW/DDL plots is that they tend to become abstract and lose their grounding in everyday reality. This isn't good for the reader. Worse, hearing it described will cause a terrible sense of ennui to wash over the slush reader.

One way to construct a problem: Read The Killer Angels by Michael Shaara. Pretend you're Joshua Lawrence Chamberlain and you're just arriving at Little Round Top. Think about how you got there, why you got there, what you thought you were fighting for when you enlisted, what will probably happen if you don't hold your position, and what it will mean if your side loses the war.

There are all sorts of tradeoffs. You're fighting against one set of changes and for another. If your position gets rolled up, many of your guys will die, the battle may well be lost, and your side will be a lot closer to losing the overall war. People living overseas, following the progress of the war, will draw conclusions about the viability of governments founded on freedom and democracy. Closer to home, thousands and thousands of people living in slavery will have far less hope of freedom. (I picked Chamberlain because he knew about the spiritual and political issues in considerable detail. It makes the ruminations more useful.)

Here's the question: if you get overrun, will ultimate evil triumph, and good be forever lost? Not on your life. Everyone who survives will go on living in a complex world full of good and evil (both of them hard to identify at times), where they have to make compromises as often as they take moral stands. But at the same time, there will be consequences proceeding from the day's events. It all matters, and it's all concrete and particular: these men, these rocks, this much ammunition.

What makes bad STW/DDL plots so stupid is that they create worlds where moral choices are simple, Dark Lords identifiable, and winning the video game means everyone lives happily ever after. Instead, go for change, connectivity, and consequences: not what victory means, but what this fight will do, and what that will mean a week or month or ten years down the road.

One problem with "saving the world/defeating the Dark Lord" plots is that they require the writer to know how worlds, armies, and Dark Lords operate and interconnect. This presents the writer with many, many opportunities to do something the reader will think is dumb, and consequently suffer a loss of the reader's esteem.

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Well said.