The Worst That Could Happen: Facing the All Is Lost Moment

Last night at our online writers' group we had a speaker who gave a presentation on bringing about the "all is lost moment." You know, the scene in your book where your MC is brought to the bitter end of her rope, her greatest fears are realized, everything has changed for the negative, and nothing will be the same.

The writing craft experts she consulted for this were agreed that whatever it was, it had to be the worst thing that could happen to the MC. Well, not literally the worst, since the worst for any of us would be death and damnation. But the worst given the wants and goals of the character. It has to have, in the words of the presenter, "the whiff of death."

And I look at Sandy, my female protagonist in my work in progress Strong as Death, and I think, damn. Because for her, the worst that could happen would be damnation.

I am not going there. Not because I'm gutless as an author, but due to immutable, external reasons. The first reason is theological: I'm having her share my conviction that once the Lord gets hold of you, He keeps hold of you, so that in the direst circumstances He'll enable you to face death before you'll deny Him. Besides, she's been in that position before and stood firm, why should she change now? The second reason is that of genre. If I had her do that, it would destroy the novel. It's romantic suspense, which expects the MCs to defeat the bad guys and live happily ever after. It doesn't allow for one of the couple joining the other side to save her skin and/or following Job's wife's advice to "Curse God and die!"

What am I supposed to do? I could ignore this "All Is Lost" rule. But I'm not so experienced and successful a writer I can turn my back on what the big kids say is a crucial element in any well-written protagonist's character arc.

I've been chewing the problem over, and maybe I'll escape through the loophole of "worst given the wants of the character" . . . in this particular book. In fact, one of the other attendees asked what do you do with a character in a series, you can't have them undergoing the same crisis book after book. I admit I didn't retain the presenter's answer; there's something about Zoom meetings that makes me feel stupid and the presenter's connection was bad which garbled much of what she said.

From what I did get I'm wondering if I can dial back Sandy's Big Want in the situation. After all, the point of the All Is Lost moment is that the crisis should strip away what the MC thinks she wants and reveal what she really needs. It's supposed to make her understand she has to fix herself instead of controlling and fixing the situation.

Sandy already has an issue with wanting to feel in control of her life . . . So maybe in this situation Her Big Want should be to feel she is in control, not necessarily of what's going on around her, but of her own spiritual strength and welfare. Kind of like, "Stand back, God, lemme show you what I can do!" And then hit her with the A.I.L. crisis such that she feels she's betrayed, not God, but herself. And so on from there.

Ohhhhhh, golly. If I go for that, I'll have to circle back and rewrite a lot of the earlier part of the book to give her more confidence earlier on. I've been a little uneasy about how I've depicted her inner life anyway. She's got too much self-doubt for no particular reason, which I've imposed on her mostly to keep her "human." Maybe reinforcing her "I've got this" attitude will help me clean those scenes up and ready her for the All Is Lost.

On the other hand, I may have already screwed up this plotting rule beyond redemption. Apparently the crisis is supposed to come two-thirds or at most three-fourths of the way through. I've got it happening at . . . let me see . . . nine-tenths.

And I still don't know what my MMC's All Is Lost crisis is to be. Before last night, I didn't know he needed one.

Home Stretch

I just may be in the home stretch of this last set of major revisions to The Single Eye.

I've done some minor rejiggering to make my female protagonist's motivations clearer as she convinces herself to do what she does at the novel's climax. A lot of that involved taking scenes out of the male protagonist's point of view and putting them into hers. All this is good for the book in general because it highlights her character arc. And I'd wondered if that was getting obscured.

One of my latest beta readers complained about the way I switch the POV back and forth between my two main characters in the course of a single chapter. She's pretty sure, she said, that that's not something an author should do. I paid no attention to this. Good and great authors do it all the time, and it's particularly kosher if you put a line/scene break between the POVs. Which I've done.

But as I communicated further with this beta, I learned the POV shifts that bothered her particularly came at the novel's climax. Far from speeding up the action, the switches between the female main character's point of view and that of the male MC only slowed things down. My reader kept having to stop and wonder, "Whose head are we in anyway?"

No other beta has mentioned that, but I think this one is right. So I've rewritten that bit so it's entirely in the FMC's point of view. This has enabled me to cut out a chunk of business from the MMC that wasn't really material, making the scene tighter and more dramatic. (Besides, the more I can cut out, the happier I am.)

I've also cut out a plot wrinkle I put in about a year ago. About that same time I got into listening to the Writing Excuses podcasts, and more than once they've emphasized that it doesn't really work to throw in one more challenge after the climax. Your reader's reached the big climactic high, they want to release their tension, and it's not fair to make them ratchet their emotions up yet again. More than that, it's hard to make them care enough to try. This point was reiterated in an episode I was playing this past week, and the penny finally dropped. I edited that plot wrinkle out today. I'd only put it in to keep knowledgeable readers from picking holes, but I'll deal with that another way.

The last challenge has to do with my FMC's character arc. To get that right involves rethinking the personality of a minor character, a county sheriff. I have to transform him from a generic intelligent nice guy into a by-the-book hardass who'll grudgingly concede a point when the facts tell him he has to. My FMC has to come out of the conversation struggling with herself over whether she did the right thing in the climactic scene or not--- and come to terms with the fact that everything in life is not cut-and-dried and under her control.

. . . Just writing that last line has got me clearer on what her arc is about. Which I hope makes this really long post worthwhile.