Picture a rubber ball sitting on the edge of a coffee table. There’s a thick carpet underneath. If it falls, nothing happens. Now swap the rubber ball for a bowling ball. Now swap the carpet for tile. Now put a baby under the table.
That image comes from Jonathan Baker, one of our instructors, and he uses it to explain something a lot of writers get wrong about stakes: they think stakes are additive. Pile on enough danger and readers will feel it. They won’t. Stakes, Jonathan Baker argues, are a multiplication problem, not an addition problem. His formula is simple: stakes equal force times vulnerability. If either number is zero, the whole equation collapses to zero, no matter how big the other number is.
This is why so many big-budget superhero movies fall flat even when entire cities are being destroyed on screen. There’s plenty of force, buildings, explosions, chaos, but no vulnerability, because we were never given a reason to care about anyone in that city. All force, no baby under the table. On the flip side, plenty of literary novels have the opposite problem: a character we’ve come to love deeply, sitting quietly with feelings that never actually get tested by anything. All baby, no bowling ball.
Jonathan Baker calls this “two halves of the shelf.” Picture a bookshelf with genre fiction on the left and literary fiction on the right. Genre novels tend to fail with force and nothing worth protecting underneath. Literary novels tend to fail with something precious underneath and nothing heavy enough to threaten it. His advice cuts both ways: literary writers should steal tricks from genre writers (mystery, suspense, a ticking clock), and genre writers should steal from literary writers (richer interiority, more specific characters, sentences worth slowing down for). The novels that actually break out, he says, are the ones that migrate toward the center of that spectrum.
There’s a second piece to this that trips writers up just as often: you can’t hold the ball at the edge of the table for three hundred pages. Constant, maximum tension doesn’t read as thrilling, it reads as exhausting, and eventually as boring. Jonathan Baker points to the first Dune film in the newer series as an example: gorgeous, well-acted, and yet strangely flat, because nearly every scene is played at the same pitch of dread. There’s no room to breathe, and without that room, the intense moments stop registering as intense. The skill isn’t holding tension. It’s releasing it and then reloading, usually with something a little heavier than what came before.
If you want more hands-on help applying any of this to your actual manuscript, our live classes and events run all year, and membership gets you access to the full replay library along with everything else we teach–or you can book a 1:1 consultation with a top literary agent here.