Turning Points

Hi everyone,

Today, I’m going to discuss turning points—a point in the scene or story where the MC learns something, comes to some conclusion, some ah ha moment affecting all her actions after it. A moment of no return.

Every scene must have a turning point, however big or small that changes the direction of the scene. It’s not easy to do and not easy to discover. Sometimes it takes playing with the scene for a while.

It might be an MC who thinks they’ve no chance of winning, realising that ‘hang on a second, I can do this, I can win’. Their actions will change because of this thought. They will be more committed, more energised, more quick thinking, they will have more agency, and they’ll push that scene where they want it to go. On the other hand, the MC might think, ‘I’ve lost’ and completely give up. Now they’ll stop trying, maybe they’ll just sit down and stop everything they’re doing. It depends on the MC.

Why am I saying this?

Well, I’m at the turning point in my scene today. My MC is one way and now must become another. Her start emotion will likely begin to change around this point. This is why I list my start and end emotions in my plan so I can track her change.

I learned somewhere on Youtube that you can boil all emotions down to four very broad categories-mad, glad, sad, and afraid. I find this grouping useful because it’s very easy to check if I’ve accidentally moved my MC’s emotion too little.

For example, I don’t really want my MC to be glad at the beginning of the scene and glad at the end. Eg: excited-beginning, satisfied-end. They both fall into the glad category. Now I can do this-in writing you can pretty much do anything as long as you have a good reason, but I don’t want to do it by accident. So in my scene plan I write the specific emotion-excited, and in brackets beside it I write the category-(glad). This works for me.

Anyway, back to turning points. The change in emotion from eg glad to sad can’t be too fast or abrupt (except with the example where the MC just sits, defeated).

Usually, it’s a slow progression but the turning point is where the emotion changes, where the thoughts change, where a realisation happens. This is where the movement of the scene is and a place to slow down and get it right.

I didn’t get a chance to write much today, but it will sit in my head while I sleep, and tomorrow I’ll tackle it.

See you then,

Joanne.