If you celebrate Easter, I hope you had an enjoyable holiday! I’ve always really enjoyed celebrating Easter with church, family, and my kids dressed in cute spring clothes that it’s not quite warm enough for yet. I always enjoy the day … but the individual years blur together in my mind. Like many of you, Easter looked very different for us yesterday. For better and worse, I don’t think this one will blur with the others!

Let’s talk about that transition moment from Act II to Act III in your story. This will happen around the 75% mark of your story.

(As I’ve said in previous posts, if you can’t tell what percentage of the story you’re at, don’t sweat that. Discerning that comes with practice, and it’s okay to not know!)

Often, this transition into Act III is a one-two punch kind of moment, beginning with a high and ending with a low.

Your character is enjoying the beauty of the river around him, thinking how fortunate he is that the journey brought him here, only to round the bend and be pitched into an unexpected rough part of the river. The rough rapids cause the canoe to start leaking again, they lose their oars, and they wind up completely alone.

You’ll hear this part of a story referred to as many things. The all-is-lost moment, the black moment, the whiff of death, or dark night of the soul are the ones that come to mind. It’s pretty ubiquitous in stories, even comedies.

Cars is a good example of a high moment right before a low moment. Lightning McQueen is basking in his new friendships with the town and the success of a surprise he’s planned for Sally, when the media arrives and whisks him away to his race in California. In Radiator Springs, the neon lights go off one by one, leading to a literal black moment.

Tangled is another strong example of this. Rapunzel and Flynn have spent the day enjoying the festival in the town and are out on the boat with the magical floating lights. They’re realizing that they’ve come to care deeply about each other, and then the Stabbington brothers appear on the shore. Flynn goes to meet with them and give them what—he thinks—they’re hunting him for, but instead they kidnap him, and make it look like he’s abandoning Rapunzel.

And then for an example that isn’t a Disney movie. In Pride and Prejudice, specifically the 2003 screen adaptation, Lizzy and Darcy are getting along very well. He’s showing hospitality to her aunt and uncle, and the tension between the two of them over the botched marriage proposal has faded. Lizzy is realizing that he’s not who she thought he was, that she quite possibly loves him, only to receive a letter from home that her younger sister has run away to elope with a man (and not just any man, but the sworn enemy of Darcy’s). With our modern lens it’s a little difficult to understand how dark of a moment this is in its historical context. That by the younger sister committing such a scandalous act, she has ruined her sisters for good marriages of their own. Especially for Lizzy and Mr. Darcy since the man she eloped with is a nemesis of Darcy’s.

Every story has different needs, so you won’t always have that high before the low, but the contrast is very effective for readers and audiences. Even if you don’t have the high, that low emotional moment is really important to creating an effective climax.

Here are some things to consider about this plot point:

Make it dark.

Whatever you pick for this moment needs to be strong enough to knock your character down without outright killing them. And the farther they fall, the more satisfying their comeback in the climax will be.

I love how in Cars, Tangled, and Pride and Prejudice, the main character is literally sent back to their home world. Having the characters return home, yet not belonging like they once did, is very powerful. (Obviously this doesn’t work for every story, so don’t try to force it if it doesn’t work for your book!)

Be clear about what they lose.

It needs to be really clear to the characters (and the audience) what exactly they’ve lost. Rapunzel loses not just Flynn, but her freedom. Lightning loses community. He’s back to a place where his value to those around him is strictly based on him being a fast car. Lizzy loses the good marriage she had been waiting for, and it’s made even more painful by the knowledge that she could’ve had it if she’d said yes to Darcy the first time.

The lie they believe has never felt heavier.

We’ve talked in several posts about your character having a lie or misbelief that they need to overcome. In this scene, the lie should weigh on them. Like how in Tangled, Rapunzel has believed throughout the movie that she’s not really strong enough to handle life outside of the tower. At the high moment, in the boat with Flynn, she believed she was strong enough. But the black moment brings the lie back with greater intensity.

The main character is now tied to the antagonistic force.

This moment is critical in pushing your character to the climactic moment of the book, so it should tie them to the main antagonist. Lightning is back to racing Chick, Rapunzel is in the tower with Mother Gothel, and Lizzy is back home with all the poverty and dysfunction that makes her a bad match for Mr. Darcy.

In addition to the villain or main antagonist, you need to be moving all the characters into position. Your supporting characters might be trying to find your main character, or maybe they’re part of the problem. Whoever is going to be at the big dance at the end, start getting them into place, even if your main character is too low to notice.

If you’re reading all this and thinking, “But I don’t even really know what my climactic moment is yet!” that’s okay.

I never get my endings right the first time. I nearly always scrap the original ending completely or do so much work on it in edits that you wouldn’t recognize it from what I’d originally written. Despite having studied story structure for years and constantly consuming stories, I never get the end right on my first pass.

But you know what’s most important when you’re writing the first draft of your ending?

Writing an ending.

You can’t fix something that’s not written.

If you don’t know the right way to end the book right now, that’s fine. If you’re like me, you maybe have to write a wrong ending before you understand what’s required for the right ending. That’s frustrating—believe me, I know—but sometimes that’s how it works.

Do you typically know your ending from the time you start the story, or do you figure it out as you write?