Does your pacing feel a little . . . off? The beginning feels solid. The ending works. But somewhere in the middle, things start to drag—or maybe they rush too fast.

It might have something to do with the location of the turning point in your story. Is your turning point in the right place? Where does the turning point actually appear in a story?

This is one of those questions that seems like it should have a simple answer. But the location of the turning point is actually more nuanced than you might think.

Where Is the Turning Point?

Where the heck is the turning point?

You know what the turning point is—the moment that makes it clear the protagonist cannot achieve their goal in the way they wanted to.

You know what it does—it forces the protagonist into a crisis choice.

But where is it?

Where is it in the books you’re reading? The movies you’re watching? Are you spotting it correctly, or are you confusing it with other major disruptive events?

And where is it in your story? Have you put it in the right place? Or is the balance off—is it happening too early or too late?

If you have ever wondered whether you’re getting the pacing of your story right, this is an important question to answer.

And the answer is . . . well, less straightforward than you’d think.

So let’s unpack it. We’ll look at all the places the turning point can be. We’ll explore how shifting the location of the turning point in any segment of the story impacts the emphasis of that segment. And I’ll give you two guiding principles to help you make sure your turning point is happening in the exact right spot.

It’s a Tricky Question

Where in the story does the turning point appear?

This feels like it should be a simple question. But every time I tried to write out a simple answer, I found so many exceptions that it felt like the simple answer was immediately invalidated.

So I decided to make a whole article out of it. Where does the turning point appear? Let’s find out.

2 Guiding Principles for the Turning Point’s Location

There are two guiding principles that dictate where the turning point falls within a story.

1. The 6 Elements of Story ALWAYS appear in order

The first principle to know is, the six elements of story always appear in order: inciting incident, progressive complications, turning point, crisis, climax, resolution.

This means the turning point always appears at the end of the progressive complications and before the crisis and climax.

Whew. There’s an easy measurement. One down.

2. The longer the story, the more fixed the location

The next principle is: the longer the story is, the more fixed the location of the turning point is.

As the story (or the segment of story) gets shorter, the location of the turning point gets more flexible.

This one’s much trickier. Let’s see it at work, starting long and working our way smaller and smaller.

Long: The Turning Point of a Novel

So in a novel, or a feature-length film, the turning point is usually going to be around the 70% to 75% mark.

That’s fairly consistent—you might find it a little earlier than that, or a little later than that, but it’s probably going to be pretty close to 75%. If you pause the movie at the 75% mark, or flip the book open about ¾ of the way through, you’re probably somewhere in the ballpark of the turning point.

Example: Pride and Prejudice

Take Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen, which is roughly 120,000 words. If you read the last article, you know that Elizabeth Bennet’s goal is,

• She wants X, to marry for love,

• Without Y, admitting she is wrong.

And the turning point of Pride and Prejudice is when Lydia runs off with Wickham. That’s when it becomes inescapably clear that Elizabeth cannot X without Y. There is no marrying for love without admitting she was wrong.

Where is the turning point?

That happens at the 70% mark—right in our 70% to 75% range.

Medium: The Turning Point of a Novella

What if we shrink it down, from a full-length novel to a novella? A full-length novel is 80,000 words, but a novella is no longer than 50,000.

Stephen King’s novella Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption is roughly 40,000 words, so about a third of the length of Pride and Prejudice.

Example: Rita Hayworth and Shawshank Redemption

I won’t tell you the full story of Shawshank Redemption here. But the basics go like so:

Andy Dufresne’s wife and her lover are shot and killed. In the inciting incident of the story, Andy is convicted of the double murder and sentenced to life in Shawshank Prison.

His goal is that

• He wants X, his freedom,
• Without Y, defying the system (which would put him on the wrong side of the law and prevent him from returning to his life).

Prison life is hard, but after a few years, he figures out how to make it work well enough. But on page 55, the narrator, Red, tells us this:

“Maybe you’ll understand why the man spent about ten months in a bleak, depressed daze. See, I don’t think he knew the truth until 1963, fifteen years after he came into this sweet little hellhole. Until he met Tommy Williams, I don’t think he knew how bad it could get.”

Red is bracing us for the turning point—the event that makes it clear to Andy that X without Y is not possible.

Because Tommy Williams is a new inmate who’s transferred to Shawshank. And he also happens to know who actually killed Andy’s wife—a man incarcerated in another prison on different charges.

Andy believes this is his ticket out: if he can find the other man, contact his lawyer, and build a new trial with Tommy’s testimony, he could clear his name. So he brings all this to the prison warden.

And Warden Norton has Tommy transferred to another prison and denies Andy the chance to pursue a new trial.

Andy is not getting out of Shawshank by any legal means. His X without Y is a nonstarter. Kaput. It’s very likely that it was never a real possibility in the first place.

Where is the turning point?

All this happens between pages 53 and 69 of the book, which is 111 pages long. That means it’s the span from 47% to 62%.

And that makes it a little bit earlier than our typical 70% to 75% mark. But we’re going to need the next 42 pages for the crisis, climax, and resolution. We have a lot of story left, and not much space in this novella—only about 15,000 words to cover it all!

You’ll notice, too, that that 47% to 62% span covers something else—the midpoint.

In a full length novel, the turning point and the midpoint are not the same thing. There’s the midpoint at the 50% mark, and then the turning point around the 70% to 75% mark. And they serve two different, distinct roles in the story (though I’ll save those differences for another article).

In Shawshank Redemption, the midpoint and the turning point are the same sequence. I’m not an expert in novellas; most stories I work with are full-length novels. But my hypothesis is that as you contract the word count, the turning point and midpoint squish together into one moment.

So in a novella, where the word count is under 50,000 words, the midpoint and the turning point might be the same moment.

Short: The Turning Point of a Scene

What about when we go even smaller than the novella? What about when we go down to the scene level?

Now we’re talking about a segment of story that’s typically somewhere between 1000 and 3000 words. Remember, the six elements of story are fractal, so there’s a turning point here, too.

Where does the turning point fall in a scene?

Well, here, the space is even shorter, and the location of the turning point gets even more variable. It can honestly range really widely.

It can fall at that 75% mark again. It could fall at the 50% mark—I don’t measure a midpoint of scenes, but the turning point could happen right around the middle.

It can even come before the 50% mark.

Example: Seafire by Natalie C. Parker

Take the opening scene of Seafire by Natalie C. Parker.

Seafire is like a pirate dystopia. In the opening scene, Caledonia and her family and friends are sailing on a ship in waters controlled by a tyrant. They’re planning to sneak through the tyrant’s barrier tonight and enter open waters and freedom. But in order to do that, they need a lot of food, because they don’t know what they’ll find on the other side. So they weigh anchor near an island.

And in the inciting incident, Caledonia’s mother tells her, “You and your brother prep for the shore run.”

Caledonia’s goal is established:

• She wants X, to execute this most important shore run of all shore runs the best that she can,
• Without Y, disobeying her mother.

If we take it one level deeper than that, if we read between the lines to see what’s underneath this surface-level want, Caledonia’s goal becomes:

• She wants X, to follow her own intuition about what will make this the best shore run,
• Without Y, disobeying her mother.

And there’s an immediate conflict between Caledonia’s intuition and her mother’s order: Caledonia knows her brother will be terrified all night if he comes on the shore run. So she negotiates with her mother to go with her friend Pisces instead, and her mother agrees.

So Caledonia and Pisces sail for the island. They arrive safely. And for a while, they gather food without incident.

And then, Caledonia, alone on one end of the island without Pisces, hears footsteps. They’re not alone. There’s a Bullet, that is, an enemy child soldier, here.

Caledonia knows the order her mother would give: Shoot first.

But Caledonia has never killed anyone before. And the Bullet is a drugged child. And she wants to save him, not kill him.

Her intuition is telling her not to shoot—that the best-possible shore run is one where she saves a child soldier, not one where she kills for the first time. Her mother is telling her to shoot—that Bullets are beyond saving, and the danger is too great to risk trying, and the best-possible shore run is the one where she returns safely to the ship.

That approach of the Bullet is our turning point. X without Y is not possible. Caledonia cannot execute what she believes is the best-possible shore run without breaking her mother’s rules. It’s either disobey her mother or compromise her own values.

Where is the turning point?

So where is all this located?

That turning point happens roughly 31% into the scene. The scene is sixteen pages long, and the Bullet walks into the scene at the bottom of page five.

The next 44% of the scene is the crisis. Caledonia spends seven pages weighing: shoot or don’t shoot? Obey her mother or follow her instinct? Protect her community or save a drugged child?

It’s a really enormous internal debate that sets up the moral crisis Caledonia will wrestle with for the entire rest of the trilogy.

And the final 25% of the scene, the last four pages, are the climax and resolution.

Shifting the turning point shifts the emphasis of the scene

Note that in this scene, the crisis is really, really long. Not every crisis of every scene will be this long. They shouldn’t be this long, or your readers will start to think that your protagonist’s main problem is their absolute inability to make any decision ever.

But in this case, in this specific scene, this internal debate sets the stage for the entire rest of the story. It merits the page space.

And it also pushes the turning point earlier in the scene in order to create space for that level of debate.

Notice what happens when the turning point comes early: this segment of story shifts its emphasis from progressive complications to the crisis. Caledonia spends most of this scene wrestling with her choice, not dealing with escalating obstacles.

In contrast, when the turning point comes at 70%, like in Pride and Prejudice, most of the story emphasizes the progressive complications—all those obstacles and challenges that make the stakes of Elizabeth’s crisis choice clear before the turning point hits and she has to face it head-on.

On the other end of the spectrum, on the scene level, the turning point can happen even later than 75% of the way through the scene. They can happen really close to the end, for a quick crisis/climax/resolution. That would put a heavy emphasis on the inciting incident and progressive complications, and the crisis, climax, and resolution would make for a quick wrap-up before we bump into the next scene. I’d say that this is a less common pacing, but it’s possible.

I’ve also speculated that ending a chapter right after the turning point of a scene could be one method of creating a cliffhanger. But I haven’t studied cliffhangers extensively, so right now, that’s just speculation. A little half-baked idea with a doughy middle for you.

Your Turning Point Rule of Thumb

The most common location for the turning point, though, is definitely around the 70% to 75% mark. This is the case for both scenes and for entire novels. In novels, it hovers near the end of the third quadrant, the third act of four-act structure. It’s right there on the line pushing us into act four.

It feels kind of funny that I’ve spent so much more time unpacking the flexibility of the turning point than I have on emphasizing what’s most common. But I want to leave this as your landing place for this question:

The most common location for the turning point is around 70% to 75% through the story.

And it always comes at the end of the progressive complications and before the crisis.

So that is the long, long answer to the short question:

Where in the story does the turning point appear?

Dig Deeper Into Turning Points

It also opened up another excellent question, one I’ve heard from listeners and debated among Story Grid editors:

Is there a difference between the midpoint and the turning point? And if so, what is it?

But that’s a topic for a different article.

If you spent this article thinking, wait, what actually is a turning point? Well, you’re in luck. I answer that question in Turning Point: How to Find and Write the Moment That Changes Everything.

And if you’ve read that article already, then you’re now armed with the knowledge both of what the turning point is and where in the story it falls. And so I challenge you to go spot some turning points in stories you love.

You’ve seen the turning point in Pride and Prejudice, Shawshank Redemption, and the opening scene of Seafire. What other turning points can you find?

And in future articles, we’ll dig into what makes great turning points work, and where turning points go wrong. Much more to come!

Until next time, happy editing!