Strong story structure is what holds our stories together. It doesn’t need to lead to formulaic or weak stories, instead gives our stories the strength and emotional resonance with our readers to be even more powerful.
So far in this series we’ve looked at the hook, inciting incident, key event, and midpoint of our novel. We’re closing out Act 2 and moving toward our climax. It can be tempting to speed forward and skip to the end… but we’re not quite ready for that.
First we need a moment with our character at a crossroads.
What is the Crossroads
There are several crossroads that happen within our story. A crossroads is when our characters will face difficult choices and need to make hard decisions.
One such moment is as we transition from Act 2 into Act 3.
Act 2 ends with the stakes higher than ever. We’ve just come out of our midpoint and things don’t look good and they certainly don’t look easy.
Which is what makes this crossroads so important.
As things are getting worse and our protagonist is being reminded of the stakes of the situation, they must decide to move forward instead of running away or avoiding the situation.
They may be afraid but they are resolving to fight.
Without this decision, we rob our character of agency (making them more of a passive bystander than hero) and we steal some of the story’s momentum moving into our climax.
We want our hero to win, we don’t want the whole finale to be them just being swept along in the action.
Action is great, but we want it to mean something.
What does this look like?
It doesn’t need to be anything fancy, really. A reminder of what’s at stake. A reminder of what they’re fighting for and their motivation. Our hero making the choice to continue forward.
This may not take more than a line or two in our story. But our character is going to need to be reminded of this decision soon (we have a dark moment coming up next) so it’s definitely important not to skip over.
With this recommitment to their goals from our hero, we’re ready to move full steam ahead into the final act of our story!
