Have you ever found yourself with a difficult decision to make? Now, think about how stressed out you were when you made that choice.
Why were you so stressed?
What kinds of pressures were you facing?
What made your decision so difficult?
Did you put off making a decision until the last possible moment?Remember how you felt at that moment, right before you made your decision. This point in your life, in the language of storytelling, is called the crisis.
We all have crisis points in our life, and they vary in degrees of severity. But usually, we can remember them with great clarity. It turns out that in your stories, fiction or non-fiction, the biggest parts, the most memorable scenes, revolve around these crisis points.
I’ve read a bunch of books on writing. In most of them, online and elsewhere, for whatever reason, the authors fail to drive home the importance of having crisis points.
This is a travesty.
If every writer knew what the crisis was, and how every single person, EVER, can relate to a well-crafted crisis, and how to craft one in each scene of their book, his or her writing would be 100x better. Add to that the huge uptick in reader interest, and you have a very important tool in your belt.
Everything hinges on the crisis.
In theory, the crisis is a very simple thing: a question.
How your character responds to that question tells the reader a whole lot about the character.
However, not every question is a crisis. Let me lay it out for you.
The crisis is going to be one of two things. It’s either (1) a best-bad-choice scenario, or (2) an irreconcilable good situation.
In the best bad choice scenario, the main character is forced to choose between two bad situations. Neither situation will be good for the main character. She is forced to choose between two outcomes that are going to seriously hurt.
Taking a real-life example, think about a couple that’s been married for years. For whatever reason, I’m sure you could come up with one, things in their relationship aren’t going well.
They’ve tried counseling, job changes, more date nights, less time together, couple’s massage, but things aren’t getting better. Then they have an argument. It’s over something small, but it blew up in both their faces.
The husband goes to the bar, and the wife calls up her sister. After the dust settles, neither one of them can look at the other.
Let’s just add one more complication – they have 2 preschool-age children.
This is a crisis point. The couple has two choices – split up or stay together. How they split up, or how they stay together don’t really matter at this point. However, the stakes are clear. There is no good choice in this one.
If they stay together, each one of them is going to drown in discontent. Other things are going to happen that will drive the two of them even further apart.
If they separate, both of them will be able to go their own ways, but now they have to think about how they are going to split up time with the kids. They’re going to now have two separate households, and their expenses are going to increase … probably double.
No matter what the couple chooses, it’s a bad choice.
Now, this particular crisis point may not be all that compelling, but it really drives home the point that the couple is at a complete cross-roads. They have to make a choice … and not making a choice happens to be making a choice.
Show me the [irreconcilable] goods.
The other kind of crisis your characters will face involves two good outcomes. Each outcome is, shocker, good for someone. The kicker here is that these good things are at odds with each other.
The good things can’t both happen – it’s physically impossible.
One of those things is good for the hero, and bad for everyone else, while the other choice is bad for the hero, but good for everyone else.
In another real-life example, let’s look at a soldier in the middle of a firefight. His squad is surrounded, and their heads are down. The only thing keeping them from dying is a large rock giving them cover.
The team is quickly running out of ammunition, and things are looking dire. The squadron leader, looking for an escape route, can’t find anything that would help. He radios air support, and a bomber drops a small payload on the enemy, opening up a small gap in the attack.
If he goes, he’ll probably make it out alive, but there’s not enough time for the rest of the squad to get out. He thinks about his wife and kids at home. Suddenly, leaving his men to see his family again gets really tempting.
Then he looks back at his men. He’s hit with a realization – he might be able to save his men. The result, however, is that he’s going to die. The only way to get his men out of there is to distract the enemy with something big.
What’s the squad leader going to do?
It doesn’t really matter – not when it comes to the crisis. The point is that he has to make a choice.
The leader’s choice is between two good things. He can save his life, or he can save the lives of his men.
Now it’s your turn.
Let’s go to “The Son of Neptune,” and see how the crisis of the first scene plays out.
Cornered, Percy Jackson (a demi-god) has to choose between fighting two gorgons (Medusa’s sisters) in his weakened state or jumping down a mountainside.
<What kind of crisis is this?
If you chose irreconcilable goods, then you’re wrong.
This is a best-bad-choice scenario. Neither choice is good for Percy. Both of them could end up in death to the hero – one is death by monster, the other is death by falling a really long way and landing without a cushion.
As you can see, the crisis isn’t that long. But the length doesn’t matter. It’s the magnitude of your crisis that hooks your readers in.
Whatever your crisis is, all it takes is some time to give your reader clarity about what the two choices are. Once the crisis is all worked out, you can move on to the highest point of action in your scene – the climax.
This article is number three in a five-part series on writing great scenes. Here is part one, and here is part two.