What’s a Turning Point?

Turning points confuse me.

Turning points confuse me.

Or perhaps it’s the way people talk about them that confuses me. I’m used to the fact that writing terminology isn’t standardized, and often can mean more than one thing. (“What’s the viewpoint?” can, for instance, mean “Which character’s eyes do we see the action through?” or it can mean “Is this story written in first-, second-, or third-person?”)

Back in elementary school, I was taught that the “turning point” was the mid-point of the story, part of the underlying structure. It was the point at which everything changed. If things were going well for the protagonist, something happened to make them start to go poorly; if things had been going badly, something happened to make them start to improve. This turning point wasn’t always obvious except in retrospect – the change was usually slow and didn’t pick up speed until the climax, near the end of the book, when the protagonist had their final confrontation and either won or lost.

I never could figure out what the turning point was, because there were too many things that looked to me as if they changed the trajectory of the story. I usually backed into it – if we were supposed to analyze a six-page story, I’d look at the bottom of page 3 and the top of page 4, take whatever was happening there, and figure out how it changed things from there on.

Somewhere during or shortly after my college years, people started talking about the turning point as being nearer to the end of the story, rather than a mid-point. It was still a single point, though, one specific action or decision or incident that started the protagonist on his/her way up out of the hole they’d dug for themselves or fallen into (or started them on their way down to disaster). At about the same time, the definition started talking about “the point of highest tension,” which didn’t fit my understanding at all. I thought the climax of the story was the highest tension point.

Silly me – the next step was conflating the two things. If you go looking now, about half of the definitions of “turning point” say, in so many words, “the climax is the turning point.” Well, it wasn’t when I was in grade school – there’s a big difference between the mid-point of the story and the final confrontation at the end.

And now I’m seeing articles – and getting questions – about multiple “turning points” in a story. Can you have multiple turning points? Is a turning point the same as a plot twist? Why are turning points important? What makes a great turning point? Where should I put the two, five, or nine turning points in my story?

I can’t answer these questions, because to me they are nonsensical. I apparently internalized that elementary school definition that turning point is an aspect of the underlying structure of a story, part of the bones rather than something one can stick in at a particular place (like a plot twist). Asking “why are turning points important” or “what makes a great turning point” sounds to me a lot like asking “why is a rib cage important” or “what makes a great hip bone.” The questions don’t mean what the person asking them thinks they mean.

Ribs and hip bones are important for mammals, but irrelevant to crustaceans. And “what makes a great hip bone” depends on whether you’re talking about cats and other animals that walk on four feet, bipeds like humans and kangaroos, or animals like bears that switch off.

At least ninety percent of the time, the people who ask these questions are would-be writers trying desperately to guarantee that their stories will work by following somebody’s directions. They’ve been told that turning points are important, so they want to put them into their stories in the right places. (They are generally smart enough to realize that sticking a hip bone in the upper chest or a rib in the story-pelvis is … not going to work. At all.)

What they seldom realize is that an enormous lot of the (still not standardized) writing terminology was developed to analyze stories that have already been written. They aren’t tools for figuring out how to write that story in the first place. Not for 99% of writers anyway – there’s always a curve-wrecker out there somewhere who really does work that way.

The other thing is that stories are different. Even if they’re writing a mammalian story that has hip bones and ribs and a spine, those features will look different depending on what sort of mammal (cat, elephant, human, kangaroo, armadillo) their story is like. Maybe it’s helpful to know they’ll need hip bones and ribs, but you can’t develop a set of generic rules that will work to create whichever animal you’ve set out to create.

Because nobody, not anyone ever, has created a living, breathing animal by carefully piecing bones together and then covering them with organs and flesh and fur. The best you can do are the wired-together bones in the Field Museum in Chicago. Even if you tinker with the DNA blueprints, if you want to end up with a living, breathing creature – whether it’s a T. Rex, a lobster, or a wolf – you have to grow it.

On May 27, 2020   /   Writing  

Tags: structure, tools