Escalation Schmescalation
Duhn duh duh duh duhn duh...
Well that escalated quickly. Isn’t that how the meme goes? And that’s what I’ve been thinking about, story-wise, how does a narrative escalate? And how do you do it quickly? And can you do it too quickly? (spoiler: yes.)
I’ll start by saying that this could probably be called “raising the stakes”, but that is a phrase I have grown to hate. Mostly because it’s agent-speak. Gotta raise the stakes, gotta see what’s at stake, gotta put butter on your steak. Okay, maybe not that one. But there is a obsession with agents lately with stakes. I’ve been in craft classes where agents talk about the need for the stakes to be clear (and of course, high. Who want’s low stakes?) I think this comes from the deep need of agents to sell shit, and a fear that readers won’t buy in unless something is at stake. It’s not completely wrong, but it has grown really tiresome.
Instead, when I think in terms of escalation, I think of rising action and barriers. A story has to start somewhere, and if it’s a decent story there is a problem. Let’s mix up some metaphors and say that’s where you light the fuse. Hey, I watched the recent Mission Impossible movie, so lighting the fuse along with a Lalo Schifrin 5/4 bopping theme song… well, it gets me going.
In most of these thrillers, problems sort of pile up on top of each other. There is never simply one fuse lit, there are multiple. I recall in one scene in MI there was a bomb being defused, a character having emergency surgery before he died, and Ethan Hunt hanging off something before it blew up. I know, I know, I should write movie synopses. But yeah, that one problem escalated into three. Now the viewer has 3x as many thing to worry about. Escalation time.
So that can work. But it also gets tiresome pretty fast. Though, the theme song does help. Other franchises like Indiana Jones also have this piling on of problems, all happening simultaneously. I don’t mind these in action movies, but I’ve rarely seen them work in books.
A film like Hitchcock’s Rope is more the direction I lean. Where as the narrative moves along, step by step there is an escalation of mistrust and the threat of violence (both past violence, and the potential for future violence.) At no point in this film does Jimmy Stewart hang off a building, or a plane, or a giant monkey. (Wait, I’m getting my movies confused.) But man does it get tense. We are let into the story of the murdering brothers, and by getting to know them more becomes at stake (arg), and then integrity-filled Stewart shows up, and even more is at stake (arg arg.) Dead guy in steamer trunk that Stewart keeps looking at! (Arg to the power of 10.)
But I’m supposed to be talking about stories not movies. Tomato tomahto. A lot can be learned from how a film escalates and why.
Hey, maybe I’ll make a list.
1. Make me care about someone.
Stories that jump into escalation before the character is properly introduced, and grown on the page, feel forced. The writer is trying too hard to get this thing ablaze, and all the matches are wet. I don’t care if Joe or Jane Character get buzzed-sawed in half because I barely know them. Cut away.
2. Rising action. Balancing the interior.
Action of a character does need to increase—usually toward some goal they are reaching for. It could be escaping the old mine before it collapses, or finally getting that big job they want. So, you gotta be clear on what they want. And along the way there is going to be a lot of interior verbiage. Stuff that explains how they feel about what is happening, how it reckons back to that time when they fell out of a tree and onto a live porcupine. Or about how they’ve always had trouble with emotions. Or what they thought about that last person they slept with.
I see these interior tangents all the time, and from writers who I admire. But if the interior is allowed to run rampant the story can become inert. The writer, and now the reader, are forced to endure what happened to the character in Grade 11 when he flunked the big test. I’m not saying we don’t need some of this, but there needs to be a balance. All car chases and explosions with no character-driven interiority is akin to eating a bag of doritos in one sitting. You can’t stop eating them, but at the end you have a stomach ache. (This was an actual description a friend of mine gave for when he read Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn.)
It’s about balance.
3. Barriers
Maybe this is just common sense, but with rising action you need to have barriers. Stuff that gets in the way of whatever is the goal. It’s like a character is trying to get out a door, and another character keeps putting things in the way: a chair, a rock, a banana peel—whatever stops them from getting out the door.
Again, this might be all just common sense, but I like to step back and look at scenes like this. What does a person want, and how bad do they want it? How bad does the other person want to stop them? What are they willing to do to stop them?
4. Make bigger stuff
Like the movies I mentioned, each barrier needs to get bigger. I mean, maybe not to the point of ticking time bombs and runaway trains… but bigger. In short fiction, this action vs barrier is compressed. But in the best short fiction, it never feels forced or awkwardly driven.
I guess what might be best is to show a story (or the opening to one) where I had escalation on my mind. See if you can spot it.
It’s a story called, August.
August
I was called into my grandfather’s room while my older brother slumped in an armchair. I’d asked Sam why he thought we were here.
“He’s dying, stupid.”
The room smelled of his pipe tobacco and Pine Sol. Gramp’s voice was quieter than I’d ever heard it, as he explained why he wanted to talk with me.
I couldn’t make sense of the thing he gave me, or what turned out to be his last words.
“Take care of your brother.”
Sam went in after me, but didn’t say much when he came out.
It was a month after the funeral before I showed him the book.
“Gramps gave you that? Lemme see.” He grabbed it out of my hand and riffled through it.
“The pages are all blank, what gives?”
“He said they won’t always be,” I said.
Sam sat with that one. We both knew Gramps was a prankster and a storyteller, mom said of tall tales. Dad said it was called bullcrap.
I didn’t tell Sam all what Gramps told in the bedroom. But on the day Gramps said, I flipped open the book and read the first page. Then I took it to my brother.
“You wrote in that, Eli.”
“You know my writing and that isn’t it.”
Sam let out a low whistle.
“So what now?”
“We go to the place and see what happens.”
Sam and I rode our bikes out to the rock quarry on the edge of town, and like it said in the book we found a greenish rock that was rounder than all the others, towards the back of the yard.
“What are we supposed to--”
My brother slammed his mouth shut when the orange spider appeared. I took off my sneaker and slammed its guts on the rock.
“That’s what it said in the book!”
I didn’t say anything. I felt bad for the spider. Sam spied a green leaf under the rock. It turned out to be a twenty-dollar bill.
“This is freaking me out,” he said.
“Uh-huh.”
That’s how it began. Over the years, always on the same day, August ninth, we opened the book to find a new location and a new set of instructions. One time we went to a factory and had to kill a rat, another time it was a baseball diamond where Sam snared a gopher and then broke its neck. It was pretty brutal, him swinging it by the neck into the backstop.
“You gotta do that?” I asked.
“You got another way?”
Two things were always the same, we had to kill something, and we were paid for it.
“Eli, a hundred bucks! Right in the dugout like it said.”
“Uh-huh.”
The first few years, as kids, we always freaked out when we found the money. As August grew closer our talk of what we’d find next got more excited, as did our theories of how this was all happening.
“You think Gramps did this his whole life? Was that why he was rich?” Sam asked.
“He wasn’t rich.”
“Dad said he was loaded. But that he gave it all away to some charity.”
“Dad told you that?”
“Sort of.”
So this began with a problem, or perhaps a mystery. What was the book that gramps gave them? Let’s call that 1 E. (One escalation). Eli shows his brother Sam the book and the pages are blank 2 E. They find orange spider, kill it, and get 20 bucks. 3 E. Then with time compression, we are shown that a rat is killed and then a gopher. 4 E. and 5 E. (each animal is bigger). The money amount is also increased ($100) 6 E. More time compression, and then the boys begin to question their grandfather’s past. 7 E.
Overall, when I look at this, the problem is becoming more complex and the cost (and reward) increases at each step. If there was a soundtrack, preferably by Bernard Herrmann, the violins would intensify as the problem escalates. The tough part of this is that character has to also deepen as the story is told, otherwise the reader doesn’t care what happens to Eli or Sam.
If this all sounds hard. It is. Cuz writing is hard. Hmm… maybe a new name for the substack.
Thanks for reading!
That was a great example and one of of my favorite short stories of yours.
Escalating the danger is an effective way to build tension, but it can lead to a problem for even the best and most famous writers. A friend of mine called it the "Green Man from Mars" syndrome. In Edgar Rice Burroughs's first John Carter of Mars story, Carter has to face off against the deadly Green Martian warrior, who gives him all he can handle. In a subsequent story, he is opposed by a group of these Green Men from Mars, and when he overcomes them you have to wonder why he had such a tough time with just one of them. But wait, if you thought the Green Men were tough, wait till Carter has to fight the fearsome YELLOW Man from Mars! Eventually, as more powerful threats are introduced, the once-dreaded green men are reduced to cannon fodder, minor menaces who are brushed aside with barely a struggle.
Jim Butcher fell down the same hole in his Dresden series with the Denarians (fallen angels). Dresden encounters a powerful Denarian in an early book, and it's all he can do to survive. In a later book, he runs into a whole pack of Denarians and has an easier time with the group of them than he had with the first one. As the threat escalates, the original threat has to be diminished in order to make defeating the larger threat plausible.
I see this happen way too often from writers who should know better.