HOW TO ACTIVATE YOUR CHARACTER'S STAKES
Unless you’ve written something very obvious, your characters won’t usually start out the narrative with a full understanding of the story’s Conflict. After all, one of fiction’s most reliable “gambits” is to have protagonists assume the Conflict is one thing only to discover by story’s end that it’s quite another.
Part of the fun of traditional stories is how conflicts tend to reveal themselves to the protagonist (and by extension the reader) in stages. I like to imagine Conflicts like a card game with one card face-up and one (or two or three or four) cards face down. As the story progresses the Conflict will begin flipping its cards, revealing its real nature, until the full scope of the Conflict is laid bare at story’s end. Whether the protagonist at whom the Conflict is directed wishes to grasp that full scope is another matter altogether.
The fact that Conflicts tend to start one way and end another way is important to remember when we’re designing our characters’ Stakes.