Why Your Black Moment Makes You a Good Writer, Not a Bad Person

Let me tell you about the worst thing I ever did to a fictional character.

I made her lose everything. Her job, her house, her best friend, her dog (the dog came back — I’m a writer, not a monster), and whatever shred of self-confidence she’d been carrying around like a coupon she kept forgetting to use.

Her own mother — well, her fictional mother — would have been appalled. But readers? They turned pages so fast you could smell the friction.

This is what writers call the black moment. It’s the scene where all hope is lost, all exits are blocked, and your Lead is standing in the rubble of their former life, wondering why they ever trusted the author. (Answer: Readers want you to pull the rug out from under their feet — then catch them when they fall. Characters are disposable.)

So What Exactly Is the Black Moment?

The black moment is the point in your story where internal and external conflict collide and crush your Lead in the middle like a fictional accordion.

In other words, everything goes wrong in a cascading rush.

Not slightly wrong. Not “oops, I spilled coffee on my laptop” wrong. We’re talking full Book of Job wrong. (Hint: whoever wrote Job knew how to hook readers. Writing is a job. Learn from its namesake.)

Here’s how you know you’ve written a genuine black moment: your Lead cannot go back to their old life. The door is closed, the house burned down, the lot cleared, and now a Dollar or More Store anchors the strip mall where your kids once kicked their soccer ball against the garage door.

If your Lead can still walk away from their problem, you don’t have a story. You have a mildly inconvenient Tuesday.

Why Writers Avoid This (And Why Life Does Not)

Here’s the thing about writers: we’re nice people. (Mostly.) (Okay, some.) (Alright, I lied about that last part. So sue me. I’m a novelist. I’m also broke. Now I’m repeating myself.)

We like our characters. We invented them. We named them. We gave them a quirky fear of ceiling fans and a complicated relationship with their mother-in-law. We feel responsible for them. Creating characters is like having babies: only easier to deliver and — for me — almost as much fun to create.

So when it comes time to take everything away — the job, the relationship, the ceiling-fan therapist — we flinch. We soften the blow. We let them keep one good thing, just in case.

And the story dies.

I know this because I’ve done it. I once let a character escape a terrible situation by having him suddenly remember a skill he’d never demonstrated in two hundred previous pages. My editor called it “a convenient rabbit from an empty hat.” She told me to fix my plot. The rabbit became the hero of the story. In Valentine Rabbit, my hero dies doing what he loved — eating an entire heart-shaped box of dark chocolates. It was a dark romance for kids four and under that failed to impress my editor.

Dead line? Yep. That’s my writing career.

The Prodigal Son Didn’t Call His Dad from the Airport

You want the best black moment ever written? It’s in the Bible. (Which, say what you will, has excellent narrative structure.)

The prodigal son blows his entire inheritance — and we’re talking a substantial portfolio, not just a bad weekend in Vegas. He ends up broke, friendless, and feeding pigs for a living. In the ancient Near East, this was the cultural equivalent of rock bottom with a shovel.

That’s the black moment.

Notice that his father doesn’t call him. Doesn’t wire him money. Doesn’t text, “Hey, just checking in, no pressure, door’s always open.”

The son has to hit absolute bottom. He has to lose everything before he thinks, Wow, am I stupid. Dad’s rich. He only has two sons: me and that jerk of a brother of mine. A little effort, I bet I can be sunning by the pool a week from now. He turns toward home, and when he starts up that dark road with nothing left to lose, the story comes alive in a way that people are still talking about two thousand years later.

That’s what the black moment does. It earns the ending.

How To Write Dark (Without Growing Horns, a Forked Tail, and Wearing Red Tights)

Here’s the test: ask yourself, what is my Lead most afraid of losing?

Whatever they said, write that down. Now take it away.

“But Eddie,” you say, “that seems mean.”

Yes. Yes, it does. Cry me a river. Then toss your character into it, send him over the falls, and watch him drown — or so it seems.

Your job isn’t to protect your characters. Your job is to put them in situations so dire, so apparently hopeless, so comprehensively awful that when they finally claw their way out, the reader cheers loud enough to disturb their cat.

(The cat will be annoyed. Cats are always annoyed. Do not write stories for cats.)

The black moment works because it strips your Lead down to who they actually are — not who they’ve been pretending to be, not the version of themselves they perform for coworkers and social media, but the real person underneath all that. And that person, the one standing in the rubble, deciding what to do next — that’s who the reader came to meet.

The Good News

Here’s what nobody tells you about the black moment: it’s actually the most fun scene to write.

Once you give yourself permission to be the devil in the Book of Job, something strange happens. The story gets easier. The characters get real. The plot stops feeling like furniture you’re rearranging and starts feeling like something alive.

Also, the dog comes back. Don’t believe me? Leave food on the back stoop and watch. In time you’ll have a dog. Every time. Pick the one you like best. Send the rest back to their owners.

I’M KIDDING!!

Seriously, always bring back the dog. Readers will skewer you for killing a dog.

Okay, bring back the cat, too, but don’t leave milk on the back stoop. That’s just begging for trouble.

Eddie Jones is the author of A Novel Idea, five pirate adventure novels for young adults, six mysteries for tween/teens, three crazy boating books, two zany romantic comedies, and some other books he can’t recall the names of right now but is positive none are about cats. He teaches writing at conferences, occasionally remembers to bring handouts, and has destroyed the correct spelling of more words than he can count. He feels fine about this.

“Anyone who can only think of one way to spell a word obviously lacks imagination.” — attributed to Mark Twain