How Long Should it Take for Your Character to Make a Decision?

The most important moment in your story is the moment when your protagonist is faced with a decision.

Do this or do that? Stay or go? Speak or remain silent? Flee or fight?

In fact, your protagonist will face dozens of decisions throughout your novel. They’ll face at least one in every scene: moments where they experience a crisis, when whatever happens next hinges on the decision they make.

But how long should this moment take? Does your protagonist need to waffle between two options for several pages in every scene? Do they even need to know the full weight of what they’re deciding?

In this episode, I’m sharing the art and science of the perfect crisis. You’ll learn:

• When to write a very long crisis and make your character’s decision-making process very clear
• How to write a short and snappy crisis your reader might not even notice (but YOU know it’s there!)
• Why there MUST be consequences for your character’s choice
• How to include a crisis in every scene WITHOUT making your character annoyingly indecisive
• How to create far-reaching consequences of the crisis choice—even if your character can’t predict them in the moment
• And more!

Plus, I’ll break down the opening scenes of two novels with very different crises.

You’ll see how Natalie C. Parker writes a five-page-long crisis in Seafire—and why it works.

And you’ll see how Naomi Novik writes a crisis so short you could blink and you’d miss it in Spinning Silver. Yet the choice the protagonist makes sparks the conflict of the whole book.

A well-written crisis can be the absolute best moment in a scene. Find out how to master the crisis in this episode!

This episode was inspired by a listener question from David. Thanks, David!

Have an editing question you’d like answered? Send me an email at alice@alicesudlow.com with the subject line “Podcast Question,” and I’ll keep it in mind for future podcast episodes!

Links mentioned in the episode:

• SEAFIRE by Natalie C. Parker
• SPINNING SILVER by Naomi Novik
• Ep. 8: What Is a Scene? The Ultimate Guide to Write and Edit Amazing Scenes
• Ep. 11: How to Edit a Scene of a Novel, Part 1
• Download the Scene Analysis Worksheet: alicesudlow.com/sceneworksheet

Transcript

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Now you won't always need five whole pages of crisis waffling do that in every scene and you will bore your readers to tears. They will think who is this insufferable character who cannot make a single decision. And how did we get stuck with them as the protagonist of this book? Sometimes I think that that's what my friends are thinking when they ask me which restaurant we should go to for dinner. But let's talk about why this works. More than that. Let's talk about why it's necessary for us to spend five pages watching Caledonia, choose between shoot and don't shoot between survival and mercy. Welcome to your next draft. Today I have a really fun episode for you. Well, I think it's really fun because in it, I get to do one of my favorite things, analyze scenes, you know, I love it. The reason I'm going to analyze scenes is to answer another question that I received from a listener. Now, if you've been listening to the podcast for the last few weeks, you know, we've been doing a deep dive into scenes, what they are, how they work and how to edit them. And one of the most important parts of every scene. Is the moment when a character is faced with a decision. That's called the crisis, a difficult choice between two good things or two bad things where each option has consequences that the protagonists will have to deal with. If you'd like to explore that definition a little bit more and find out where the crisis fits into every scene. I recommend listening to episode eight. What is a scene? That's a holistic breakdown of how scenes work. It's also one of my favorite episodes of the podcast and one of the most popular episodes among listeners. So it's worth checking out. You can find the link to that episode in the show notes. And in response to that episode, David wrote in with a great question about how to write a great crisis. A crisis that engages readers moves the story forward and has all the elements that a crisis needs to have in order to work. So let's get right into it. Here's David's question. As I get ready to make sure that there's a decision the character needs to make in every scene. I see that it wouldn't be natural for him to actually consider both the good and the bad of deciding a or B each time. Over 60 chapters such contemplations would get tedious. But later in another chapter. He might see things or implications that he hadn't thought of at the time he made that decision. So in terms of the pros and cons of each decision. Aren't they left unsaid. Left for the reader to discover. This is a great question. And David you're absolutely on the right track here. Yes. In every scene. There's a moment when a character has to make a choice and every time that choice has consequences. But that choice is not always a long drawn out moment. It doesn't always involve a lot of hemming and hawing. We don't always hear the character laying out the pros and cons of each side of the choice. In fact, I'd suggest that's actually uncommon to see that level of analysis of the choice in the text, on the page. I want to illustrate how this works with a few examples. First, I'm going to show you a scene where there is a long drawn out crisis. And where we see the weighing of the pros and cons choice a and choice B there on the page. Then I'm going to show you a scene that does the opposite. Absolutely no deliberation of the choice. At least not that the reader can see there on the page. There is a choice and it has major pros and cons, but the character doesn't explicitly detail them for the reader. We just see the brines, the characters in, and then we see the choice that she makes. Let's start with the scene with a very long crisis. This scene comes from the novel Seafire by Natalie C. Parker. It's a wild fantasy novel about a crew of female pirates. And if you're writing a wild fantasy adventure novel, this is absolutely a great book to pick up. I'm going to look at the first scene of this book, which is the prologue. You can read this for free by searching for the book on Amazon and using the look inside feature, I'm linking to it in the show notes. So you can check it out. First. Here's a quick synopsis of the scene. Caledonia and her family are part of a crew of rebel families who have resisted the tyrant of their land. They live on a ship where they navigate the seas and evade bullets, which are crews of child soldiers that the tyrant has enlisted to subdue all resistance and kill anyone who refuses to fall in line. At the beginning of the scene. Caledonia's mother's steers the ship near an island. And since Caledonia and her friends Pisces to shore for a resupply of food. So the two girls go ashore and they separate to collect food and everything is going well. And thin. Caledonia here's someone who was not Pisces and she Dodges into the bushes and Heights and she looks out and sees that it's a bullet. A teenage boy around her age, who was decked out in guns and ammo and also collecting fruit. Now Caledonia has been taught the rules of engagement to follow here. The first rule is never be seen and she's done that. She's hidden. And the second rule is shoot first. So when his back is turned, she sneaks out of the bushes, pulls out her gun and points it at him. He hears her. He freezes and without even turning around, he puts his hands up and says, whoever you are, you have me. And now we have Caledonia's crisis. Shoot. Or don't shoot. I'm going to read you some of the lines from the crisis of the scene. The bullet asks. At least if you're going to kill me, let me see your face. Caledonia's pulse quickened. There was no time for this, where there was one bullet. There were a dozen more, she needed to find Pisces and get back to the boat and she needed to do it now. Shoot her mother's voice urged, but this was one rule Caledonia had never had to follow. So that's one passage and here's another, a page later. Caledonia asks for the boy's name and here's what happens. A sad smile, twisted his lips. Lear I'm called Lear and I expect you'll be the last to know it. He was so ready to die. And so young, was he young enough to be saved? They said it didn't take long for the children. Eric took to succumb to the dreamy pole of silt. Addiction made bullets both loyal and mean. But they also said an encounter with a bullet always always ended in one of two ways. Either you died or he did. And then here's one more passage, a few lines later. Lear has seen Caledonia's hesitation. And so he starts to beg for his life. Here's what happens. Please. He said, please show me the mercy. The father never does take me with you. Whatever life you have. It's got to be better than the one he forces on us. Please help me. This was precisely why the rule was shoot first and not shoot as soon as possible or shoot when you feel ready, but she broken the rule. And now this wasn't a bullet. This was Lear. Lear who desperately wanted a way out. Lear who hadn't hurt her Lear, who might be someone's brother. If it were Donnelley her own brother on some other beach with some other girls gun to his head. Wouldn't Caledonia want that girl to help him? Now these passages, aren't the full crisis. They're just little snippets of it. In fact, the full crisis starts on page eight and runs until page 13. That's five whole pages where we see Caledonia wavering between shoot and don't shoot. She's thinking about how dangerous Lear is, how she's always been told there's only one into this death, his or hers. She's thinking about how her mother has prepared her for this. And the script that she's been taught is to shoot. She's thinking about how her role here is to protect her ship. And if she shows mercy, Lear could send his ship of bullets to destroy her family. But she's also thinking about how Lira is a boy, her age. Who was enlisted into this child army against his will. She's thinking about how she's never killed anyone before, and he isn't making any move to harm her. She's thinking about her own brother and how easily this could happen to him and how she wouldn't want someone to shoot Donnelly if he were in Lear's place. That's the weighing of the pros and cons, the choice between a and B, where both choices have consequences. And here. The consequences of both choices. Our life and death. And then the crime axes. Caledonia doesn't shoot. In fact, she tells Lear that she's not going to shoot him. And she accidentally reveals to him the location of her ship. And then Leer pulls a knife on her, stabs her in the gut, runs back to his ship and leads the bullet ship to overtake her own and massacre her entire family while she watches helpless from the shore. And in the resolution, we see Caledonia crumpled on the beach, bleeding into the water Pisces next to her, watching in horror as their ship burns, Pisces asks her what happened, but Caledonia feels too much guilt to reveal what she knows. She chose mercy. And as a result, she got her entire family killed. That prologue does not pull its punches. Now you won't always need five whole pages of crisis waffling do that in every scene and you will bore your readers to tears. They will think who is this insufferable character who cannot make a single decision. And how did we get stuck with them as the protagonist of this book? Sometimes I think that that's what my friends are thinking when they ask me which restaurant we should go to for dinner. But let's talk about why this works. More than that. Let's talk about why it's necessary for us to spend five pages watching Caledonia, choose between shoot and don't shoot between survival and mercy. In this scene, we're establishing a lot of critical elements. We're meeting Lear who will become the antagonist of the whole series. We're seeing that even though Caledonia lives in a very dangerous world where children are enlisted into an army of bullets, she's been sheltered enough that her default is to want to trust, to show mercy. And she has never had to kill before. We're seeing how dang hard it is for her to choose her family safety over the potential for redemption and the individual standing before her. We're seeing that as much as she admires her mother and wants to be like her, she cannot bring herself to follow her mother's voice in her head whispering to shoot. And we see that when she hesitates, when she chooses mercy over survival, she loses absolutely everything. The worst possible thing happens. She watches her ship Bern and her family impaled on spikes. And when we turn the page from the end of the prologue to the beginning of chapter one, We don't need Caledonia to ever say it outright for us to know. She will never make that mistake again. In those five pages of crisis indecision. Natalie C. Parker sets the tone and the stakes for the entire trilogy. Caledonia is going to be faced with choices like this choices that echo this first shoot or don't shoot choice all the way through the series. She is going to be challenged. She is going to be challenged to choose between survival and mercy, between self protection and the chance for someone else's redemption. Over and over and over in this series. In all those future moments, her default will be self protection. It will be survival. It will be to shoot. She will actually have to relearn mercy and it will not be easy for her. And in order for her to go on that journey and for us to understand why that's so incredibly difficult for her. We need to see her hesitation in this moment. And what that hesitation costs her. So, this is a perfect example of when a long drawn out crisis can be really, really effective. You don't want to spend five pages on the crisis of every scene. But in the moments where your protagonist makes really key decisions. Those can be moments where your story will benefit from a few lines, paragraphs, or even pages illuminating all facets of the crisis choice as your protagonist weighs their options. Now let's take a look at the reverse. A scene in which the crisis is super brief, where we don't wait options consciously on the page, hardly at all. This example comes from spinning silver by Naomi Novik. This is also an excellent why a fantasy novel. It's a retelling of the Rumpelstiltskin fairytale. Once again, I'm going to look at the first scene and you can read it for free using the look inside feature on Amazon, head to the show notes for the link. This first scene is the first part of chapter one. By the way it's worth mentioning that chapter one is made of two scenes and they're separated with a line break and a little graphic. So there's a clear visual indicator where the first scene ends and the second begins. Here's a quick synopsis of the scene. Miriam is the daughter of a moneylender, but her father, isn't a very good money lender. He's too kind and generous. And he lets all the villagers payback only small portions of the money. He lends them on the schedule that they like rather than the schedule that he needs. Miriam knows this isn't the way that things have to be because her mother's father is also a money lender in a larger town, and he's much more firm with the people he lends money to. And therefore he's comfortably wealthy. But Miriam's father's struggles to keep food on the table. And as she watches the villages in her town use the money, he's linked them to purchase some. She was feast. Her family is left with little food and few resources. And every year the winters get colder and harsher until the year when Miriam is 16, when the winter is so bitter cold that she and her parents sit in their little house on the edge of town shivering. Her father goes to collect money from the villagers, but still doesn't have the heart to ask for what he's owed. Even though Miriam knows that many people can pay, but simply don't want to. And Mariam and her family run out of food and they run out of oil for the candles and then Mariam's mother gets very sick and she tells Miriam when the winter breaks, Merriam should go live with her grandfather. And here's what happens next. The crisis in the scene. I'm going to read the whole thing to you so you can see exactly how this works on the page. Here it is. The last time we had visited my grandfather. One night, my mother's sisters had come to dinner with their husbands and their children. They all were justice made a thick wool. And they left for cloaks in the entryway and had gold rings on their hands and gold bracelets. They laughed and sing. And the whole room was warm. The wood had been deep in winter and we ate bread and roast chicken and hot golden soup, full of flavor and salt seem rising into my face. When my mother spoke, I inhaled all the warmth of that memory with her words and longed for it, with my cold hands, curled into painful knots. I thought of going there to stay a beggar girl, leaving my father alone. And my mother's gold forever in our neighbor's houses. I press my lips together. Hard. And then I kissed her forehead and told her to rest. And after she fell, fitfully asleep. I went to the box next to the fireplace where my father kept his big ledger book. I took it out and I took his warn pin out of its holder. And I mixed ink out of the ashes in the fireplace and they made a list. Uh, moneylenders daughter, even a bad money. Lenders daughter learns her numbers. I wrote and figured and wrote and figured interest in time, broken up by all the little haphazard scattered payments. My father had everyone carefully written down as scrupulous with all of them as no one else ever was with him. And when I had my list finished, I took all the knitting out of my bag, put my shawl on and went out into the cold morning. I went to every house that Otis and I banged on their doors. It was early, very early, still dark because my mother's coughing had woken us up in the night. Everyone was still at home. So the men opened their doors and stared at me and surprise. And I looked at them in their faces and said cold and hard. I've come to settle your account. This crisis is very different from the crisis in that Seafire scene. And this one, there are stakes. Yes, but we don't see Merriam state them explicitly for the reader. Here's some stakes that we can infer. If Miriam does nothing. Now her mother will send her to live with her grandfather. She'll gain all the comforts that she desires. But she'll go and shame and it will essentially mean giving up on the justice. Her father is owed, allowing the villagers to keep walking all over him and her family. This consequence, the consequence of doing nothing is actually pretty clear on the page. Merriam, doesn't say it in as many words, but it's implied in the whole paragraph where she describes the luxuries of her grandfather's house and suggests that she would go to stay there as a beggar girl. The consequences of her other choice though, are not explicitly stated. Here's what we can infer. If Marianne does something, if she takes matters into her own hands. She might just be able to get the money. Her father is owed. She will provide for her family in a perfectly legitimate way, the way they ought to be provided for already. She will turn around a failing business and keep their family afloat. And that's what she does. She goes to all the houses in the village where her father is owed money and she tells them what they owe and requires them to pay. If they cannot or will not pay immediately, she establishes a payment plan with interests. And then she goes to someone who sells food and she pays a fair price for soup and eggs and bread and honey with the money that she collected. And she brings the money and food home to her family. And the scene ends with her going to make her mother comfortable. There are a few things I want you to notice about this. First. Miriam doesn't him and haul over her choice before she makes it. She doesn't go back and forth saying maybe she'll go get the ledger or maybe she'll wait for winter to end and go live with her grandfather. She just stands up and does it. In fact, we don't even know the specifics of what Miriam is choosing between until she does it. As the readers, we don't know that the choice that she's facing is do I leave my parents and go live with my grandfather or do I take matters into my own hands and run my father's business? We just see her tends to her mother. Then stand up, get the ledger and start calculating what they're owed. So that's the first thing. This is not a long drawn out choice. She simply stands up and starts doing math. And the second thing I want you to notice is this. We do not know in this scene, what the negative consequences are of Miriam's choice to take over her father's business. We know the pros and cons. If she doesn't. Pros she'll go to live with her grandfather and comfort. Cons. She'll feel like a beggar and her family will continue to let the village take advantage of them. And we know the pros. If she does take over her father's business. She'll finally collect what her father is owed and she'll be able to care for her mother until she's. Well again, and no one will have to leave to live with her grandparents. But we do not know the cons. They are not mentioned in the crisis moment. They are not mentioned in the climax. They are not mentioned in the resolution. This doesn't mean that there are no cons. Remember every choice has consequences. And just about every single time there are positive and negative consequences to each choice. But this gets back to David's original question. What if over time we discovered that there were more consequences than the character originally thought. Can the consequences be slowly revealed later, instead of all at once in the crisis choice. And that's exactly what happens here. Marian's not thinking about the negative consequences of taking over her father's business and in the scene, they don't come into play at all. But there are negative consequences. In this example, we find out what some of those consequences are in the very next scene. The second scene begins with this line. After that I was the money lender in our town. Merriam continues, going out to collect the debts, owed to her father and where he is soft. She is from. But she finds that this isn't always easy because sometimes people legitimately can't pay. And then she has to figure out how to enforce her collections so that she won't lose the respect that she's just gained. So she becomes merciless. In the spring, she goes to collect from a peasant farmer who has borrowed more than he can ever repay and who barely has pennies. When he can't pay, she tells him. Then your daughter will come work in my house to pay off the debt for half a penny every day. And when the daughter comes to work at Miriam's house, the next day, we learned the first consequence of Miriam's choice to take over the money lending. She has become cold. She has become harsh. The softness gentleness, kindness, mercy that her parents hold in high regard is being frozen out of her by this work. And her parents are angry and depressed and guilt-ridden about it. They do not want this for her. They do not want her to become hard, to become merciless, to become exactly what she has to become in order to do this job. In fact, her mother yells at her father that because he wasn't able to muster the firmness required to sustain their family. Mariam has decided to sacrifice her own character to keep them afloat. Now we know. By becoming the moneylender Miriam rescued her family and is retrieving what they are owed. But this comes at the cost of her own mercy and softness and it pains her parents. So, this is a consequence that we learned in the second scene, not in the scene where Miriam makes the initial choice. She is not weighing. Will I sacrifice my own character or go to my grandfather as a beggar? She's just doing the work. And it's only once she does the work that we see the consequences. And they'll also mention there will be more consequences of this choice. Because Miriam has decided to become the money lender. It will put her in the way of being noticed by people that she'd rather not be noticed by. And it will actually contribute to the primary conflict of the whole book. And that's not revealed in the second scene, but gradually over the next several scenes and chapters and even acts. Essentially Miriam has made a choice to save her family in the dead of winter. And over the course of the next few months, she and the readers we'll gradually learn all the far reaching consequences of that choice. So there you have it. Two different ways to write the crisis choice of a scene. In Seafire we get five pages of Caledonia wavering back and forth shoot or don't shoot. Protect her family or offer this boy a chance at redemption. Kill someone for the first time ever or risk being killed by him. And in spinning silver, we get a brief thought about what could happen if Miriam followed her mother's recommendation. And then without ever telling the reader, what she's thinking of doing. Merriam stands up, gets the ledger and takes over her father's job. Both of these approaches are fantastic. They're compelling and effective. They give the reader exactly the amounts of information that we need to understand what's going on and be hooked to keep reading. You can use both kinds of crises in your scenes. In fact, you can shake it up throughout your book. In some scenes, the crisis might be five pages long, especially in scenes where your character is making the biggest and most important decisions of the entire story. And then some scenes. The crisis might be a paragraph or a line, or even just implied rather than stated outright. We don't always need to see characters, racks within decision. Sometimes characters think long, deep thoughts before they make a move. Sometimes characters have quick physical reactions, a pause, a breath, a little hesitation. Sometimes characters react quickly, even instinctively. And it's only after that they discover the weight of their actions. Sometimes they know the full consequences of what they're choosing and they make wise and studied decisions. Sometimes they don't know the full consequences and they just have to go with their gut and keep moving. And sometimes they think they know the full consequences or at least enough of the consequences and they make a choice with the best information they have. And later that choice comes back to bite them. This variety helps make every crisis interesting for the reader. So as you edit your scenes, play around with these different options. Look for scenes where it's worthwhile to expand, to really let your character and your readers feel the weight of the decision. And look for scenes where it's most natural to contract to make quick short decisions and deal with the consequences as they come. Just remember, even when your characters don't know that there are consequences, even when your readers don't know that there are consequences. You know that there are consequences. And your character has to make a choice. By the way. If you'd like to see an example of a scene where the crisis is so short, that it's barely on the page at all. Check out the first scene of under the whispering door by TJ Clune. I did a deep analysis of the crisis of the scene in episode 11, how to edit a scene of a novel part one. The crisis happened so fast, you could blink a dude visit and there is not a second of hesitation or weighing of options there on the page, but there are still two choices and the choices have stakes I'll link to both the book and the episode in the show notes. Now, let's put this into practice. Here's what I want you to do. Choose a scene in your novel, it can be any scene. You might particularly enjoy doing this with a scene where your character makes a really important decision. But you can do this with any scene. Now you're going to identify the crisis choice your character makes in this scene. What are they deciding between I. I want you to figure out what their choices are, choice a and choice B. And then I want you to figure out what the consequences of those choices are. What good things happen if they pick one or the other. And what bad things happen if they pick one or the other. And once you know that I want you to play around with the scene. Experiments with writing a really long crisis where they weigh both options. See if you can make it to a full entire page. And fin experiments with writing a really short crisis. Where they only partly weigh each option or they don't explicitly state the consequences or they make a snap decision. What feels right for the scene that you're working on, what best fits your characters and the choice that they're making right now? And the impact and significance that the scene will have on the story as a whole. There's no right or wrong answer. No best type of crisis for every situation. You're looking for the crisis that best fits this scene in your book. And if you're enjoying this part of the scene and you want to go even deeper, check out episodes, eight and 11 of the podcast, where I talk about what the crisis of a scene is and the questions that I use to make sure the crisis works really, really well. Links to those episodes are in the show notes. And while you're at it. Pick up a copy of the scene analysis worksheet, which will help you identify the crisis in your scene and see how it fits into the larger structure of the scene. You can get that download@alicesubtler.com slash scene worksheet. And the link for that is in the show notes as well. And that's it for this episode. Enjoy exploring the crises in your scenes and happy editing.