Noodling about Stakes

Mmm, steaks.

No, I've been thinking about stakes, in a narrative sense: what makes them effective, what makes them relatable and engaging, and the implications thereof on the story of Roselight.

I have big, grand plans for the conflict in this story. Perhaps a bit too grand, at least for the short term.

When I talk about "stakes" here I'm talking specifically about the stakes of the conflicts and engagements in the narrative - what do our characters stand to lose? What does their society or world stand to lose? What happens if they fail? How weighty are the tasks and battles they're undertaking, and do they make sense?

An illustrative example is the Star Wars universe. In the so-called "Skywalker Saga," basically every character is highly influential over the fate of the entire galaxy and its trillions of citizens. The main characters are godlike space wizards and chosen ones, prophetic mythological heroes, and the villain is literally evil incarnate. The fate of the entire universe hangs in the balance, and that gets...pretty boring, sometimes. I know the sequels are easy pickings, but they wrote themselves into a big circle where the only meaningful conflict they could think of was to bring back the evil space wizard and have him be literally every evil space wizard put together, with the goal of annihilating the entire universe or something with a vast navy of enormous planet-sploding spaceships.

Contrast some other spinoff media like the extremely engaging Andor series (no spoilers within). Andor focuses on a much smaller scale; our heroes aren't godlike space wizards, they're drifters and washouts and nobodies, people picked up off the street; their objectives are small and local. We know eventually this story will feed into a more high-stakes plot that, in turn, supports the Skywalker Universe Saving Saga of Destiny. Nevertheless, what feel most impactful are those small stakes we can directly relate to and understand - none of us have saved the universe from pure evil before, but we know what it's like to have arguments and complicated relationships with people, or to be in tough situations in life that we can't seem to find our way out of.

As a window into the overarching plot I'm looking at for Roselight, I can offer a quick and dirty outline of what's outlined so far:

• Noira gets new job after Ark Royal incident, meets friends
• Friends help Noira come out of her shell
• On a trip with friends, Noira discovers the company (ASMC) is razing villages and other bad things
• Noira and friends are hunted by company law enforcement
• They take refuge at a hideout with a resistance organization (Roselight)
• Roselight attacks ASMC's razing operation
• ASMC obliterates Roselight's hideout
• Roselight flees on a desperate mission to run an exposé on the Company
• Many more unknown future events?????

This of course largely excludes any interesting character arcs that take place during the story, in favor of highlighting only the most essential points and events.

So the question I arrive at is: what do I want to get out of this story? How high should the stakes really be here?

My Grand Plan, at a glance, reads like Noira being at the spearhead of a planetwide (small nation-state?) rebellion, which can't happen overnight. The story is naturally about her experiencing the world; we follow her narrow perspective pretty closely until we meet Roselight, where we really see the bigger picture of the issues she's been seeing. There is room, when we meet the revolutionaries, for major events to not include her, and for the story to exceed her direct experience.

However, I do really want to have her and her friends be in most of the main arc. The only one of these bullets that I feel comfortable leaving them out of is Roselight's strike on an ASMC razing operation - this doesn't have to include them for its impact on the story to work. By contrast, the subsequent bullet point - ASMC retaliating by annihilating Roselight HQ - should have our heroes front and center to witness and really internalize the consequences of that event and how those impact their character development.

Furthermore, to get exactly into the issue of today, I have a lot of really big steaks stakes written in there right now. The big one I'm having trouble with is Roselight's very existence being threatened, to the extent that people like Noira and her friends - who are pretty new to this whole thing - being involved in the last-ditch effort to save the group. It implies that the org is at a point of having like 12 people left over, with the goal of those 12 people being to save the entire cause and bring down the giant of ASMC.

There's a couple ways I can deal with this, and a lot of them are mostly just "think about the logistics of the story for 5 more minutes." Some points that could help:

• Roselight is not down to like 12 people. The base of operations that is razed catastrophically is a huge loss of power, but mostly leaves the group homeless rather than decimated. There will certainly be significant casualties, but there's still a structure and chain of command and groups of people doing different things. There are also other places they can operate out of - they've just lost a lot of equipment and their big foothold. They're scrambled and lost, but they can regroup with a lot of work.

This is also important for them to even be able to execute their exposé plan; I'm envisioning a lot of infiltration and espionage that means you still need some deep connections and good hardware available. To this end, I think the island of Cantor, which is what I've been calling the Roselight HQ place, is primarily an airbase, the place they stage the interdictors and some combat ops out of. It's the obvious strategic target for ASMC to eliminate, it's most easily traceable after the attack, and it cripples the organization, but it's not like.....the hideout where the entire resistance lives.

Also, the "last-ditch" exposé plan is probably not that critical, in the sense that it's not the only shot they have left at survival. When I originally conceived of the idea, I thought the destruction of Cantor was a great way to up the ante for the exposé - now they have to succeed, as it's all they have left, fleeing directly from the ruins of Cantor to ASMC headquarters on irid'An. Realistically, a resistance group like this, though not swimming in personnel and capital, has the ability to do multiple things at once; the exposé is a very important mission for their future, and will still be the centerpiece of their activity after the razing of Cantor, but it's not quite a desperate dying breath.

• Remember that the goal is not to save the world. We're focused on one planet, Orus. And, we're not trying to save it from destruction, or even to bring down the big bad company ruling over it, ASMC (although a healthy dose of trust-busting may be in order). Roselight learned from the destruction of Cantor that it can't handle everything on its own. The resistance is hoping to run this exposé on ASMC, which is really just meant to bring its crimes into the public eye and force the hand of the Rosarium government. They're fighting to be treated like people; the degree to which that changes the status quo is up for negotiation if ASMC can at least just NOT RAZE ENTIRE TOWNS.

•  The plot doesn't happen overnight. As I mentioned before, Noira and friends aren't going to end up on the front lines after being at Roselight for a week, but I can give them more things to do, more intermediate steps. It will take them some time to grow acclimated to the environment and to the cause; they need to gain experience and get more involved in the group before they would ever feel comfortable volunteering for that mission, let alone actually be allowed to participate by the chain of command.

Those interim plot points can occur in multiple places; prior to the destruction of Cantor, Noira and friends might be helping with gathering intel and equipment for the attack on ASMC, or otherwise laying the foundations for that work - or, as above, for other things that Roselight might be working on at the same time. It can also be before the destruction of Cantor, to allow our characters to contribute to the big mistake that has big consequences. Room for development!

I think those are definitely the big notes for now. It's worth noting that high stakes are not necessarily a bad thing in a story, if they can be tempered and contextualized. What I don't wanna do is to drop my characters abruptly into a situation where they're responsible for saving the world - they have to naturally develop into that role. Really, I don't have a great idea of the time scale of the overall story (or, for that matter, how that's even measured in-universe), and I think the things I want to have happen lend themselves to a longer story duration.

There's tons of room to incorporate all kinds of fun character interactions and arcs into this. It's one thing to have big obvious story points, and it's another thing entirely to stitch those together. I don't want the overall story to be a vessel serving no purpose besides transporting the plot from A to B to C - again, the events should progress naturally in between, and it's going to be the much smaller-scale stuff that makes that happen.

One last bit before I forget - I'm in the early stages of formulating new characters that our trio of kids will meet when they first take refuge with Roselight. We need to have some known members of the resistance, and I'm looking forward to developing them in time. Some names have popped into my head: Donner (he/him) and Kierstyn (she/her). These two might be closer to peers of our protagonists, or they might lie higher in the command structure, occupying leadership roles - I'm not sure yet, but the structure and details of Roselight itself are a whole new can of worms that I'm not going to open right now.

That's all for this one - mostly a log of my own storymaking process. Also, happy 2023! Here's to many more posts in the new year.