The Dark Moment

The Dark Moment or “Black Moment” is the absolute low point of your character’s life. The Dark Moment will validate your character’s journey. But how do you know your Black Moment is as dark as it can be?

I have made up this formula that will knock your readers’ breath from their lungs.

1. Imagine your character, at the very end of your book, after the HEA (Happily Ever After), being blackmailed by criminals. What is the worst thing they could get your character to do? Turn her back on her family? Kill someone? Whatever you come up with is what your character must do.

2. What does the character have left? A husband? A child? A career? Then is what she must lose by doing 1.

Moving from the abstract to the concrete, this may mean that in order to save her family, your character has to torture someone for information. If she does, her family will be found, but she might go to jail. This is her Dark Moment.

In the final act, she will then set out to recover what she lost and defeat the baddie once and for all. To recover her freedom, she might save someone’s life who pays for a top-drawer lawyer. She is acquitted. Her mind is still reeling from what she has done, but at least she has her family.

In an alternative scenario, she has written an expose on a politician that destroyed his career. When she discovers she has been duped and her accusations are false, she must confront a dangerous organization to find proof that will exonerate him. The information she finds will set the record straight, but implicate her own husband in a murder. She no longer loves her husband and has more chemistry with the lead investigator, but how will the children react? Or her own parents, who are proud of their successful son-in-law? Still, this is what she must do, even if it means losing her family’s love. This is her Dark Moment.

In the final act, the murder committed by her husband turns out to be only the tip of the iceberg. He was a professional hitman. In a shootout with her husband and his pals, the lead investigator saves her life. Suddenly, her parents no longer mind his lowly job. Even her son comes around after they uncover the extent of his father’s murderous past.

Most of all, milk the moment. The reader has to understand, but also feel, this is the low point in the character’s arc.