The Idiot's Guide to Writing

Lesson 10: Tension and Stakes

There's a commonly accepted idea that a good way to inflate tension is to have progressively higher stakes. It's a flat-faced lie. Stakes and tension do not increase linearly, or at least not in the way people think they do.

I haven't watched the MCU in a while because I'm tired of it, but there's a genuine problem where the stakes have gotten so bloody high that no one believes it and the writers can't carry through with them. The Snap is the biggest offender. Even when the Snap happened, everyone knew it wasn't gonna be permanent because there was no way the MCU could carry on. The writers wrote themselves into a corner, and as a result, you get weird discrepencies where Tony Stark's death feels more impactful than literal omnicide. Really puts the quote "one death is a tragedy, a million is a statistic" into perspective. 

In a singular story, the stakes may gradually increase on a personal level as the Plot Thickens, but the universal stakes that affect everybody will probably stay static. The cases where the universal stakes are changed midway through are usually treated as plot twists, because the characters' actions are suddenly reframed and/or redirected. However, several overarching narratives that have multiple entries feel the need to raise the stakes higher and higher to maintain interest. Theoretically, the higher stakes should mean higher tension, but that's not really how tension works. Our feeble mortal minds just can't comprehend anything past a certain point, and we can counterintuitively check out if the stakes lose their meaning. 

Tension doesn't mean more peril, it means more uncertainty. Damseling a love interest is cliche but effective because it adds personal stakes on top of the universal stakes. You don't even have to increase those personal stakes, you just have to make them more urgent. It's one thing when a jackass protagonist tells his friends off at the beginning of the story versus at the climax. The same action can cause wildly different reactions from the audience depending on how it's framed.

 If you're creating an episodic narrative or a series, inflating the stakes isn't helpful unless there is a tangible difference in how the characters and plot function. Make new conflicts. Pose your protagonists with questions and problems they have never faced before. That will always be interesting and meaningful in some way.

None of that's to say that you can't raise the stakes, or that there's any reason to ignore them. Tension is built on stakes, and you need to clearly establish those stakes or else there's no tension. Saying a world will explode doesn't mean anything unless you show what on the world will explode and make the audience care about what can/has been lost (and this is partially what the MCU failed to do in regards to the Snap, I'll talk about it in a bit). Furthermore, you have to convince the audience that those stakes are at risk. If the protagonists win everything and aren't forced to change, reconsider, or even cut their losses, then there's no tension and the reader is never worried about the stakes. 

The trouble with the MCU's Snap is that it's too focused on the scale of the stakes that it didn't do a great job of pulling through with them. The character deaths are all fine and dandy, but there are no movies between Infinity War and Endgame. So, (A) the character grief wasn't explored as much as it needs to be and (B) how the Snap affected the world at large wasn't explored either. The problem is, they had to do this for the stakes and tension to work. From a meta perspective, everyone knew the Snap wasn't going to be permanent even when it happened, so they had to hit these beats. They didn't, so...unfortunately Endgame doesn't feel like the triumphant climax it should've been. Marvel's TV serieses are doing their best to make up for it (WandaVision, Hawkeye, etc.) but these stories are after-the-fact, both in-universe and in release order, so they can't do the heavy lifting. 

TLDR, you need tension to convince the audience that there are stakes, and you need stakes to convince the audience that there is tension. These two things are invariably intertwined. Universal stakes are only as impactful as they are personal, and you have to show what can be lost and that it seriously could be throughout the story.