The Five Stakes Tools
Five devices — elephant, backpack, breadcrumb, hourglass, crystal ball — that make an audience wonder what happens next.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~weeks to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 95%
Stakes are whatever makes the audience wonder, worry, or hope about what you'll say next; the moment they stop wondering, they stop listening. Dicks gives five concrete, reusable devices to manufacture stakes into ordinary true stories — and warns against front-loading them all at the start.
Origin
Matthew Dicks's named stakes toolkit from Storyworthy, demonstrated in his story 'Charity Thief.'
Core principles
- 01Assume 100% of the time that nobody wants to hear what you have to say
- 02If the audience isn't wondering what's next, they're no longer listening
- 03Stakes should build throughout a story, not be dumped at the front
- 04Most stakes belong in the first half; the second half is the roller coaster to the end
How to run it
- 1
Elephant — plant a big worry up front
Immediately land something that makes the audience worried and signals what kind of story they're in — like a big spaceship shooting a little one. It doesn't have to be what the story is ultimately about.
Pro tip Unlike a movie, a spoken story has no trailer — your first sentences must do the trailer's job.
- 2
Backpack — load them with your plan
Tell the audience your plan (your hopes and dreams) before you execute it, so they carry it with them and feel every deviation. Ocean's 11 shows you the heist plan so you can think 'oh no' when it goes wrong.
Pro tip Without knowing the plan, the audience can't feel the tension when it goes awry.
- 3
Breadcrumb — drop an incomplete hint
Offer a fragment of what's coming without the full picture, like a gun visible in the room that you know must eventually go off.
Pro tip Breadcrumbs promise a payoff the audience will wait for.
- 4
Hourglass — slow time at the peak
When the audience is on the edge of their seat about to learn what happens, prolong it — pile in details and make them wait, 'turning over an hourglass and letting the sand run.'
Pro tip Only deploy once you know the audience genuinely wants the next sentence.
- 5
Crystal ball — predict a (possibly false) future
Predict a future, accurate or not, to plant worry: 'If I get this wrong, Eileen's going to cry in front of 22 kids who'll remember it all year.' A realistic bad future makes the audience anxious even though it never happens.
Pro tip The prediction only needs to be plausible, not real, to create a genuine stake.
Watch out Don't front-load all five stakes at the opening out of fear of losing attention — spread them out and gauge when the audience needs the next thing to wonder about.
In the wild
In Dicks's story 'Charity Thief,' two-thirds is just explaining how he ends up on a porch — inherently not entertaining. He uses an elephant at the start (that can change colors), plus a backpack, a breadcrumb, an hourglass, and a crystal ball to keep the audience wondering, without inventing any events.
→ A mostly uneventful setup becomes gripping purely through engineered stakes.
His story about stripping in a McDonald's break room at 19 for a bachelor party has stakes baked in by sheer absurdity, so he adds none of the devices.
→ Shows the tools are for the 'benign' majority of stories that lack natural stakes.
Common mistakes
Front-loading all the stakes
Throwing every stake at the opening to hold attention is a mistake; stakes should build continuously so there's always a fresh thing to wonder about.
Assuming the audience already wants to listen
A VP assumes their title earns attention. Dicks assumes nobody wants to hear him, which forces relentless stake-building.
Is it for you?
Best for
Speakers and pitchers whose true material is accurate but low-drama and needs engineered tension.
Not ideal for
Stories whose events are already inherently shocking or absurd — adding devices over-engineers them.
From the transcript
“I always say you should have what I call an elephant at the beginning of the story”
“I I call something called a backpack, which is I you tell the audience what your plan is before you carry out your plan”
“there's crystal balls where you can predict the future. You don't have to predict an accurate future.”
“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”
From the episode
How to tell better stories
Matthew Dicks (Storyworthy)