What’s the Point? (Of Your Story)

Photo by Patrick Perkins on Unsplash

When I’m working with a coaching client, one of my first questions about their book is: What is the Point? 

I don’t mean “what is the point of writing it at all” but “what life truth are you trying to convey to the reader?” 

For pure genre novels, it may be fairly simple: Love conquers all. Evildoers always get their just desserts. Simple stories that rely on tropes, whose purpose is to entertain without making the reader think too hard, have their place.

But if your main character has an Arc of Change, if they go through emotional development as a result of what happens in the story, then that has to mean something.  

The Point is also known as the epiphany, or the emotional heart of your story. 

Matthew Dicks, in his book Storyworthy, calls it the 5-second moment. It brings the story together, and makes the reader go “aha!” at the same moment the character does. It’s the moment when the character learns the lesson the story has been trying to help her learn.

This usually comes at the “all is lost” moment. Whatever the Hero/ine has been trying to do to solve the problem has failed. 

And then, they make a decision to choose differently. 

An insecure person makes a bold decision to act. A person who plays it safe due to past hurt decides to take a risk. A person who feels alone suddenly makes a connection (or realizes they’ve always had that connection). A person who has been afraid of making a big sacrifice realizes the only way forward is to make it, no matter the consequences. 

So, the Point might be: “fortune favors the bold” or “sometimes you need to take a risk/make a sacrifice in order to realize your dreams” or “we all need connection with other people.” Whatever it is, it’s something that emerges from the combination of the Outer Stakes (what happens in the story) and the Inner Stakes (how that affects the protagonist’s arc of change). 

You can start with a Point you want to make about the world, and construct the story around it. The danger there is that you become pedantic, bashing the reader over the head with it, telling them how they ought to think (Atlas Shrugged comes to mind here). 

Or, you can let the Point grow organically from the story itself. Maybe you as the author won’t realize what your story is really about until you’ve written your first draft (or more than one). When you do realize it, you can go back and seed clues so that the epiphany hits more strongly. 

Without that 5-second realization, your story will fall flat. The reader will ask, “So what?” We read great fiction, or memoir, to gain some nugget of wisdom about the world and how to be a human in it. If there’s no point to the story when we’ve been led to believe there will be, then we’re disappointed. (Again, there are some genres where it’s fine not to have a deep epiphany. There’s not much character development, and that’s okay. Readers are reading for the comfort of the familiar, not to challenge their worldview.)

We recognize it all the time, when our friends tell us a story about something that happened in their lives. Matthew Dicks calls it “the moment when something fundamentally changes.” It could be something as simple as a new understanding about another person or situation. Or something you realize about yourself: Why am I staying silent about this? Maybe if I want it to stop, I need to speak up, or do something differently.

An epiphany could be as simple as a changed attitude, but usually it prompts some sort of action. Dorothy Gale realizes “there’s no place like home,” and then gains the ability to return to her family. Ebeneezer Scrooge realizes his life as a miser has made him and everyone else miserable, and decides to change his ways before it’s too late. 

Look at your work in progress. If you’re lost on the Point, look at the epiphany. Where is the moment when the protagonist makes the decision to act differently, after learning the life lesson the story has been teaching?      

Important note: if the character refuses to recognize the epiphany, or refuses to change, then the story becomes a tragedy. Or, if the character recognizes the epiphany but the circumstances of the story don’t allow them to change (e.g., they have their moment of realization but die in a hail of bullets moments later), that is also a tragedy. Modern readers aren’t big on tragedy. Most of the time, they like at least a bit of hope at the end. 

Some stories can get away with it. Even Walter White, at the end of Breaking Bad, makes sure his family has the money, and rescues Jesse. He remains an antihero, but we deeply understand why he has made the decisions he has. 

Nailing the Point - and the corresponding 5-second moment of epiphany - can be tricky. But if you do it right, you create a story that will resonate with your readers long after they turn the last page.  

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