# Escalate the Cost, Not Only the Noise

The Inkagai Way: 100 Practices for a Writing Life

By Anna Lishman & Brad Lishman

Practice 46 · Part 5: Scene and narrative movement

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> Escalation increases cost, uncertainty, complexity, or irreversibility.

Most of us hear escalation as volume. Chases get faster, explosions bigger, accusations louder, and the reader’s attention tends to do the opposite of what the writer hopes, because size and stakes are different things. Louder events tend to teach the reader that the book will keep getting louder, so each new peak must be taller than the last. Escalation can also be misread as repetition, a third version of the same difficulty with the character failing slightly harder.

George Orwell’s narrator in “Shooting an Elephant,” a police officer in Burma, is summoned to deal with an elephant that has been ravaging a bazaar. He takes a rifle too small to kill it, thinking the noise might be useful. By the time he finds the animal it is eating peacefully in a paddy field and, he judges, no longer dangerous, and he has no intention of shooting it. Behind him a crowd has been following, two thousand at the least and growing, and he realizes he can feel their two thousand wills pressing him forward. If he turns back he will be a white man laughed at. The elephant has stopped being dangerous while the price of declining has gone up. Then the road behind him closes, because the first shot does not kill the elephant, and the animal takes a long time to die.

Orwell escalates cost, what the character stands to lose. Macbeth escalates irreversibility, how much of the road behind has closed. After Banquo’s murder he decides to go back to the witches, saying he is “in blood / Stepp’d in so far that, should I wade no more, / Returning were as tedious as go o’er.” The play gets him there step by step. The first murder is preceded by long deliberation. For Banquo’s he keeps his wife ignorant of the details. By the time he learns that Macduff has fled to England, he resolves that “the very firstlings of my heart shall be / The firstlings of my hand,” and orders the killing of Macduff’s wife and children. His hesitation shrinks with each act while the cost to others grows.

Shirley Jackson’s “The Lottery” escalates uncertainty, how little anyone can predict, by narrowing it. The opening has the children assembling and a pile of stones in the corner of the square. The drawing proceeds by family, then by household, then by member, so that the circle of risk tightens until it closes on one person. No stage is louder than the last, and each is calmer in procedure and narrower in hope than the one before. Complexity, how many things must be managed at once, needs no canonical case. A character keeping two lies straight has more to manage with each scene.

Cost comes first here because readers tend to weigh events by what they cost the people in them. However loud the room, a character with nothing yet at risk is not in danger. A character with a particular thing at risk, who has just been shown how little room is left to protect it, makes every small decision enormous.

A work does not have to climb, though. A story that raises the stakes in every scene can numb the reader, who cannot judge a new high against so many. Plateaus and reversals let the reader recover scale, and a deliberate drop is itself information (Practice 49). Some works descend, circle, or hold, and for a quiet book the right escalation may be one choice per chapter that closes off one more way back.

**Practice.** Spend thirty minutes on the next significant choice your character must make, and name it. List three things the character values. Rewrite the choice so that making it, or refusing it, would cost one of those three, at a price the character can see and name, and draft the scene at three different prices. Compare what the character does when the price is high enough to hurt. Then ask, of the version you keep, whether anything has become harder to undo.

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