The turning point is the moment everything changes in your story—the catastrophic event that forces your protagonist into their crisis choice. It’s the moment your entire story hinges on. Get it right, and your climax feels inevitable. Get it wrong, and even brilliant writing can’t save what follows.

And in spite of that—or perhaps because of that—it’s one of the most difficult moments in the story to identify and to write well. Let’s break down a simple framework to get it right.

What Is the Turning Point?

This story element is the moment that changes everything. The critical event every part of your story has been building up to. The catastrophe that sends your character reeling into their calamitous all is lost crisis.

What is “the turning point”?

Or, let’s drop the Jeopardy homage and be honest here:

What the heck is the turning point?

It’s fundamental to every unit of story. It’s the fulcrum between our premise and ending.

And yet it’s incredibly hard to see. Ridiculously hard. “I really thought I knew what stories were and now I think I know nothing at all” level hard.

If you have ever struggled with turning points—identifying them, writing them, figuring out how to make them hit with all the oomph you want your readers to feel—well, I have too.

I avoided creating this article for the better part of three years because turning points are just that tricky.

But I have good news: there’s a framework that really does unlock the turning point. It enables you to spot them in the stories you read. To write them in your novels and scenes. And to pack them with an emotional punch your readers won’t be able to stop thinking about.

In this article, I’m going to share that framework with you. And maybe, just maybe, this will be your turning point to finally grasp the turning point. Only one way to find out!

My Quest to Find the Turning Point

Can I be honest? I struggled with turning points for a really long time.

I have been studying the six elements of story for eight years now. I was taught in week one what turning points are and how and why they’re central to the story. And I was given a bunch of novels, movies, scenes, and even songs and challenged to find the turning point.

Which resulted in some fascinating debates—fill a room with Story Grid editors and hand us a story to analyze, and we will discuss and debate it for hours.

And yet I still found turning points really hard to see.

3 Clues to Find the Turning Point

I was taught that the turning point is:

• The moment the value shifts—hence the name; the value turns
• The final progressive complication, which forces the protagonist to face a crisis choice
• The most disruptive event in the scene

Clue #1: Look for the Value Shift

I would look for the value shift.

But I found that there are two values that shift, an internal value and an external value. The external value is the shift in the action and world around the character, and the internal value is the shift in the way the character thinks and feels.

And those don’t shift at the same time. One tends to shift in the turning point, and one tends to shift in the crisis and climax. Sometimes it’s the external value shift that happens first and causes the internal value shift, and sometimes it’s the internal value shift that happens first and causes the external value shift.

So: I found a lot of values, and a lot of moments when they shifted, and some of those were the turning point and some of those were the crisis or climax.

So that strategy helped me some. But I still struggled with turning points.

Clue #2: Look for the Crisis

So I tried a new tactic: I looked for the crisis first.

If the turning point is the final progressive complication before the crisis, the event that forces the character to make a crisis choice, then finding the crisis would lead me to the turning point. I’d spot the crisis, and then I’d look for the very last thing that happened right before the character made their choice.

And this works for scenes.

Scenes are such a small scale—one to three thousand words. There’s often not a lot of distance between the turning point and the crisis. Sometimes I’d be able to mark the turning point as precisely as a specific sentence, the one immediately before the character was wracked with indecision.

But this doesn’t work so well on the level of the entire novel.

The reality is, at that scale, a lot of stuff happens in between the turning point and the climax. The turning point happens around 70% through the story, and the climax happens around 90% of the story, sometimes even later.

That means a full twenty percent of the story lies in between the turning point and the climax, and only a little bit of that is the crisis, and it’s not always percent 72, the sentence right after the turning point.

I believe that this is one of the reasons why I got so good at scenes, while I continued to wrestle with the global story for years.

Clue #3: Look for the Disruption

But all wasn’t lost. I had a third tactic: the disruption.

I envisioned the turning point as a ball of fire dropped into the scene. I remember Shawn Coyne explaining it once as a phere, P-H-E-R-E, a ball of energy, a unit of power that jolts the scene. And I took that concept and made it super literal in my mind.

There’s a scene from the movie Children of Men, which we studied at that Story Grid training. If you’ve been around Your Next Draft for a while, you’ve heard me reference it before. In the scene, a carful of people is driving down a forest road. They’re tense, but they’re friendly and laughing.

And then a car that is on fire rolls down the hill to their right and stops in the middle of the road, blocking their path, and a group of attackers runs out of the forest and surrounds the car. It’s an ambush.

And they cannot go forward anymore. They have to literally turn around and run the other way. They’re also not friendly and laughing anymore. They are terrified, and they’re being shot at, and one of the people in the car is hit and dies.

That visual is what’s playing in my mind when I envision the turning point. I’m looking for the moment in the story that feels like a car on fire rolling into the protagonist’s path, something so enormous and catastrophic and deadly that they cannot continue forward, but must make a complete 180 and sprint in the opposite direction.

This is an energetic sense about a story: what feels, in your gut, most chaotic, most disruptive, most challenging?

And it does help. One of the things I watch for when I’m giving writers feedback is, does the turning point of a scene feel that disruptive? Or does it feel like a weak little whisper, a gentle nudge, blink and you’d miss it? Escalating the turning point to this level of chaos goes a long way towards making every scene unputdownable.

But there were some pitfalls with this approach. It didn’t work 100% of the time. As my editor friend Brannan Sirratt points out every time I bring up this scene, our roomful of Story Grid editors spent at least an hour debating whether that moment when the car on fire blocks the road is indeed the turning point, or whether it’s actually the inciting incident.

And that’s the challenge with measuring the turning point by “which moment is the most disruptive.” Sometimes, I’d find the most disruptive thing, and it would be the climax, and sometimes it would be the inciting incident, and sometimes it would be the midpoint.

All of those moments are meant to be disruptive. That’s not a mistaken measurement. They weren’t wrong to be so intense, and I wasn’t wrong to note how intense they were. But that intensity alone, that level of ball-on-fire disruption, wasn’t enough to ensure I could correctly identify the turning point every time.

Also, I haven’t said it in a while, but this is one of my mantras: I’m all about making the subjective objective. And analyzing a story based on a gut feeling about its degree of likeness to a ball of fire is not objective.

Close, but not There Yet

I’ll say it again: ALL of these measurements helped me master scenes. With just these three ways of thinking about turning points, I was able to build a whole scene revision philosophy that has served me and all my writers very, very well.

But I still felt a gap around turning points, especially on the level of the big-picture story. I was still missing something, still getting something confused, still identifying a variety of ball-on-fire pheres that turned out to be other moments playing different roles in the story.

But Wait, Another Clue!

I have to imagine that Shawn felt this too—this gap in precision.

Because in the last few years, he’s articulated another way to measure the turning point. It goes like this:

The turning point is the moment that makes it clear it is impossible for the protagonist to achieve their goal of X without Y.

What does that mean? Let’s break it down.

The Inciting Incident

Remember, the inciting incident is a disruption to the protagonist that sets them on the pursuit of a goal.

That goal can be articulated as the protagonist wants X without Y. They want to get something—and they want to get that without something else, without having to take an action they want to avoid or disrupt an existing state that they want to preserve. They want their cake, and they want to eat it too.

The Progressive Complications

The progressive complications are challenges that move them farther from their goal or assets that move them closer to their goal.

Every progressive complication escalates the conflict. That means they raise the stakes and make the pursuit of the goal more complicated.

Even when the complications are positive and things are going in the protagonist’s favor, they still escalate the conflict because they give the protagonist more to lose.

And that brings us to the turning point.

The Turning Point

The turning point is an event or revelation that makes it inarguably clear: it is not possible for the protagonist to achieve X without Y.

X without Y is over. X without Y is gone. It’s possible that X without Y was an illusion to begin with, wishful thinking ungrounded in reality.

There may be a route where the protagonist can still achieve X. But that route is going to require them to do Y, the thing they at all costs did not want to do to get it.

In all the other progressive complications, there still appeared to be a viable route for the protagonist to get X without Y. Sure, maybe there were roadblocks, but it still seemed possible with some optimism, grit, and dogged determination.

But the turning point utterly destroys that hope. Once the turning point happens, there is no way for the protagonist to get X without Y.

And so, the result of the turning point is that the protagonist is faced with a binary choice. Now that their goal has failed, what will they choose to do next? They have two options:

Will they give up Y in order to get X?

Or will they give up X in order to maintain Y?

Weighing that choice is the crisis of the story—but more on that in a future episode.

When X Without Y Becomes Impossible

This framing of the turning point is so much more measurable than all the other qualities I described above.

Once you define the protagonist’s desire, their goal, a specific conditional Goldilocks dream of X and Y, you can search for the moment when X without Y is eradicated.

What happens to make it incontrovertibly clear that X without Y is not possible? What forces the character to make a choice—both X and Y, or neither X nor Y?

That’s the turning point.

What About the First 3 Clues?

All the other qualities I described still hold true, by the way.

The turning point is a progressive complication. That means that it, too, is a challenge to the protagonist’s goal that raises the stakes and makes the pursuit more complicated.

It is the final progressive complication. Once this happens, we’re no longer in the progressive complication space of the story. The turning point catapults us into the crisis.

And it is the most disruptive progressive complication. Where all the other complications were navigable, this one is like a total system failure. It is still a ball of fire thrown into the story.

We’ve just gotten much more specific about what that ball of fire is. The fire is, no X without Y. The 180-degree turn is, will you choose to do Y to get X, or sacrifice X to preserve Y? Which part of your goal will you abandon?

The turning point is also the moment when the value shifts. But again, there’s nuance here about the internal and external values shifting at different moments. So I have found it more useful to imagine that the turning point, crisis, and climax all together are the crucible in which both values shift.

So all the original measurements I used are still useful:

• The moment the value shifts—hence the name; the value turns
• The final progressive complication, which forces the protagonist to face a crisis choice
• The most disruptive event in the scene

But the master measurement, the one I’m using now to begin and end my analysis, is this:

The turning point is the moment that makes it clear it is impossible for the protagonist to achieve their goal of X without Y.

Example: Pride and Prejudice

This is fantastic in theory, right? But the real test is putting it to work in a story. Let me tell you a story of two young people who fall in love, but cannot keep that love without Y.

The story is called Pride and Prejudice.

Elizabeth’s Inciting Incident

Elizabeth’s inciting incident is meeting Darcy at a ball.

He’s an extremely wealthy eligible bachelor, which makes him a wonderful match by most measurements.

But Elizabeth discovers quickly that he’s also extremely unpleasant, proud, and standoffish. She dislikes him immediately and judges that despite his swoon-worthy wealth, he would be a miserable man to marry. And she takes pride in her ability to so quickly get a read on him and write him off.

Elizabeth’s “X Without Y” Goal

This inciting incident kicks off her goal: to marry for love without changing her judgment of people.

In fact, at that very ball, her friend Charlotte tells her, “I dare say you will find him very agreeable.”

And Elizabeth’s response is, “Heaven forbid! That would be the greatest misfortune of all! To find a man agreeable whom one is determined to hate. Do not wish me such an evil.” She really does not want to change her mind.

We’re going to get sharper clarity on that goal in a moment. But if you asked Lizzie right now, right after that ball, what her goal is, this is what she would be able to see exactly what she told Charlotte. Her goal is to marry for love without changing her judgments of people.

Elizabeth’s Progressive Complications

The goal gets a big boost when she meets Wickham—a charming, handsome, agreeable man who gives her lots of attention and whom she likes immediately. She judges him a wonderful man, and he lives up to that splendidly.

Her goal does take a slight hit when Wickham stops flirting with her in order to start flirting with a woman who just inherited £10,000 from a relative’s death. But when Elizabeth’s aunt points out that this seems a bit like golddigging, Elizabeth defends him—it’s not a red flag, but totally reasonable.

The goal takes a much bigger hit at the midpoint, when Darcy proposes, much to Elizabeth’s astonishment; Elizabeth rejects him; and then Darcy delivers a letter explaining everything she has misunderstood about him. The letter also reveals that Wickham, beneath his charming exterior, is in fact a golddigging dirtbag. She exclaims as she reads, “Till this moment, I never knew myself!”

Which, shoot! Now her judgments start to change. That Y is starting to crack.

But it’s not fully cracked yet. Because now we can see what Y truly is, the thing Elizabeth couldn’t see on page one: the thing she wants to avoid isn’t simply changing her mind about people. What she really doesn’t want is to admit she was wrong.

Her X without Y actually is: marry for love without admitting she was wrong about people.

While Elizabeth now sees things more clearly, she’s not yet ready to admit her error. In the second half of the story, Elizabeth, more openminded, is examining the evidence before her to see what’s actually true.

She chooses not to tell her family what she’s learned about Wickham, because he’s leaving town anyway, so that problem has solved itself.

And then it’s quite a surprise to discover that Darcy is a generous and gracious host when she accidentally runs into him at Pemberly. It seems like they could get along pleasantly, if given the chance.

Elizabeth’s Turning Point

But then, Lydia runs off with Wickham. It becomes public knowledge not only in her family, but the entire town, that Wickham is a dirtbag and has been one all along, and that he’s disgraced Lydia and by extension all the Bennets.

This is our turning point. X, marrying for love, without Y, admitting she was wrong, is now impossible.

There is no more hiding she was wrong when her wrongness is public knowledge. There is only the question of whether she will face it and admit it, or continue to deny reality.

Elizabeth’s Crisis

And once this dam breaks, the floodgates open. She admits to herself that she was wrong about everything.

She was wrong about Wickham—he’s trash.

She was wrong about Darcy—he’s wonderful.

She was wrong about herself—she’s fallen in love with Darcy.

And her unwillingness to admit her error to this point has placed her family in a position of such disgrace that it’s likely no eligible bachelor, much less Darcy, will consider her or her sisters ever again.

Elizabeth’s Climax

So when Lady Catherine shows up on her doorstep in a rage, demanding that Elizabeth promise she will never marry Darcy, Elizabeth is grounded in the truth, her own admission to herself of her own love.

She refuses to take up the defenses she would have jumped at at the beginning of the story—that is, she refuses to save her pride by telling Lady Catherine that Darcy is a jerk she would never consider marrying. In fact, she refuses to make any promise that she won’t marry Darcy.

Though her heart is broken and she considers Darcy lost to her, she stands aligned in her truth: she does in fact love him and would marry him. She doesn’t say this explicitly to Lady Catherine, but it’s implicit in her entire interaction.

Elizabeth’s Resolution

And when Lady Catherine reports on Elizabeth’s speech to Darcy himself, it’s that aligned honesty within Elizabeth that gives Darcy the hope that she might still consider him. And so he comes back to Longbourne to make things right. And when he proposes again, this time, she accepts.

Elizabeth has now achieved her goal: marrying for love—and found that it was only possible with Y, only possible by admitting when she is wrong.

How Lydia’s Elopement Shifts the Story

Did you catch the turning point in all that?

When Lydia runs away with Wickham, X without Y becomes impossible. Elizabeth cannot marry for love without admitting she is wrong. The only possible path to a love marriage is through admitting her wrongness—to herself, to her family, and to Darcy.

And let’s check that turning point against all our other metrics.

Lydia runs away about 70% through the story. Her elopement is for sure the most disruptive event in the story—in Regency England, it’s the societal equivalent of throwing a ball of fire into your marriage prospects, financial future, and social standing.

It shifts a number of values—the truth about Wickham hidden to revealed, the Bennet family respected to disgraced, Elizabeth and her sisters hopeful to distraught, Elizabeth and Darcy together to apart.

And it forces Elizabeth to her crisis choice: will she admit she has been wrong and change her judgments of herself and everyone else? Or will she hold onto the protective, defensive walls of believing herself to be in the right?

Which by the way, is what everyone else in town does. As soon as Wickham is revealed to be a dirt bag, everyone is like, “Man, I knew that all along. I never liked that guy.” The town is upholding that protective, defensive insistence that they were right all along.

But in order for Lizzie to find love, she must choose the other way. She must choose why admitting she is wrong.

So by all our other measurements, we can spot that Lydia’s elopement is the turning point.

But most importantly, the X without Y framework reveals what Lydia’s elopement is doing within the story. It shows us the exact pressure that turning point places on Elizabeth, the exact choice she’s then forced to grapple with in the crisis.

Spotting Turning Points Takes Practice

I hope that example helped illustrate for you something that can be really hard to see. Like I said right at the beginning, turning points are tricky. I spent a long time getting them confused with so many other parts of the story before they finally started to click for me.

But this framework has helped me tremendously, and I hope it helps you too.

Will I win the game “Spot the Turning Point” with 100% accuracy now that I’m using X without Y? Probably not.

Story structure is so simple—we know it in our bones, have been steeped in it since childhood. And yet it is also so complicated and nuanced that I think I’ll still be learning how it works when I’ve studied it for decades.

Certainly, that was the case for Shawn—he’d been studying and using and teaching this structure for thirty years before he articulated “X without Y.”

So if you still struggle to spot the turning point in your story, don’t feel bad. If you analyze a story one way on Monday, and you come back on Tuesday and analyze it again and see something different, don’t feel bad. That is the nature of this work. That is the nature of story.

Your Turn: Play “Spot the Turning Point”

I encourage you to practice by playing around with every measurement I’ve laid out here. Pick up a story you love, and challenge yourself:

• Can you spot the goal? What’s X without Y?
• What makes it clear that X without Y is impossible?
• Is that event disruptive?
• Does it cause the core value of the story to shift?
• Does it force the protagonist into the core choice of the story—both X and Y, or neither X nor Y?

If all those things are true, then congratulations, you’ve found the turning point.

The Turning Point in Your Use of Turning Points

I have often found that I gravitate towards a goal of being an expert without making a mistake. So all those times when I tried to use my original measurements of turning points and found them still missing some layer of precision were really frustrating to me.

But being an expert without making a mistake is an illusion if there ever was one. And so we can all take a tip from Lizzy Bennet, recognize the truth we were missing, and grow and change.

Realizing X without Y is not possible was a turning point in my own understanding of turning points. Perhaps it will be for you, as well.

I have much more to say about turning points—where they appear in the story, what I look for when I’m editing them, and where writers fall into common traps. All of that will be coming in future articles.

For now, be on the lookout for everywhere protagonists must face the truth that X without Y is not possible. It’s uncomfortable as all get out—but it gives us the gift of seeing reality clearly.

Until next time, happy editing!