When Nothing Happens: Recognising Pressure Beyond Plot in Literature ~ Reading Craft #5
Some of the most devastating literature operates by suspension, drift, delay, even repetition. This essay discusses five forms of pressure that extend beyond plot.
I hadn’t read Borges in almost a decade when I picked him up again in 2023. The story I chose was The Library of Babel—which remains one of his most relevant shorts. It even echoes forward into later fiction1, even shaping the library of Master Ultan in The Book of the New Sun by Gene Wolfe2.
Regardless of its reputation, one could argue that nothing happens in this story.
It is just eight pages describing a library.
It has no plot in the traditional sense. No leading character, no dialogue, no discovery. Just eight pages of description of the Library of Babel, its internal curiosities, and the kinds of books it holds.
Yet I couldn’t stop reading—and when we discussed it on my podcast, in the raw recording, we spent over two hours taking it apart piece by piece. Eight pages. Two hours of discussion.
Do you know why?
Because ‘stakes,’ as they’re invoked in writing advice, are not all of the same type. Just as the library of Babel contains an infinite number of books, there are countless ways a story can generate ‘stakes’.
As critical readers, we must discover what type of stakes the story contains, and judge the work accordingly.
Yet readers, and writers, often narrow down into the most common understanding of ‘stakes.’
What writing advice calls ‘stakes’ is usually just the most visible form of narrative pressure: the internal and external tension that drives the narrative forward. All too often, this becomes associated, almost exclusively, with conflict of any sort.
But ‘pressure’ as a mechanism is not limited to a single form. Life-and-death situations are not the only means to create that pressure, because there are multiple types of stories and each of them has a different driver—moral ambiguity, tonal dissonance, psychological fracture, aesthetic intensity, and thematic resonance. Each of these internal drivers will raise ‘stakes’ of a different sort.
So what other types of stakes can you find?
Below, I’m listing five different categories of pressure, each accompanied by a reading recommendation. The graphic below summarises where the category name, where the pressure originates (the source), what does it affect (the domain) and a question as an example of its core instability.