Lenny Rachitsky: uncertainty

Transcript context

…You got to have something. I heard some advice in either your book, a different book about adding stakes is just drop a dead body. Every new dead body is additional stakes that are added to the story. I don't know how often people can do that in random stories. But what you can take from that is, so often people load the front end of a story with all of the stakes because they're worried that the audience will not pay attention to them. So they think I'm going to throw everything right in front, and that'll hold an audience for the rest of the story, and that's a mistake. What we want is stakes continually to build throughout a story. So dropping a dead body really means, drop a new steak, don't load it all, don't front load it, give us something to wonder about, and then gauge when we need the next thing to wonder about, and spread out those stakes. We need most of the stakes to occur within the first half of a story. Ideally, the second half of the story is now the rollercoaster to the end. So we might drop one in there at an appropriate time, or just through plot. Sometimes they just happen to need to be in a place. But so often I hear people front load stakes because they're worried about audience attention.…

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