Crisis

There’s a moment near the end of every great story when all hope seems lost. Someone the hero loves dies. The plan falls apart. The enemy wins. This is the crisis, and it’s a kind of death. Whether it’s literal, like a mentor killed, or the figurative death of every option running out, the crisis is the moment the audience thinks, there’s no way out of this now.

But the darkness has a purpose. At the crisis, the story asks your protagonist one brutal question.

Everything the story has built comes down to this. They can crawl back to their old self, the safe and familiar one, or they can kill off who they used to be and become someone new. The crisis is where they finally have to choose.

Here’s how you find yours. The crisis is the worst possible consequence of the choice your protagonist made at the very beginning. Macbeth murders a king, and the crisis is the armies of his former allies marching on his castle. Trace the opening decision to the worst place it could lead, and you’ll arrive at the crisis. It’s the bill coming due for the story’s first move.

And make the right choice the hardest choice. A real crisis puts the protagonist in a position where doing the right thing risks losing everything. In A Few Good Men, the young lawyer can take the safe plea deal, or he can go to war with a colonel in open court and possibly throw away the whole case. The safe road is always sitting right there, and that’s exactly why the choice means something.

The Muppets, of all films, captured the dilemma perfectly. At his lowest point, Gary stands there and sings, ‘Am I a man or a Muppet?’ That’s the crisis question, underneath every version of it ever written. Who am I, really? The whole story has been building to force that question, and the answer is the choice the character makes.

Notice how the three body parts lock together.

That’s the engine of the whole second half.