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8P THE BIG BLACK MOMENT
COURSE OUTLINE
Building great stories is an art that involves a certain amount of creativity, but it also involves knowledge in basic novel structure and various writing techniques. One of the most important parts of novel structure is learning how to build the Big Black Moment into the basic structure of your novel.
Building a story to the most climactic moment isn’t just a matter of creating events that escalate in consequences. The reward for the reader in any memorable story is that feeling of satisfaction at the end of the book. In order to give your reader the satisfaction he’s looking for, it’s imperative to know how to make your Big Black Moment the most effective it can be. To do that, you must build to the climax from the beginning of your story. The road…how you get there…is as important as the climax itself.
The elements we will be studying this month overlap and intersect, so it’s difficult to break it out into points we will cover each week. However, in this course we will learn:
A. What goes into making the Big Black Moment
- a) Purpose
- b) The role of conflict
- c) Making the reader care
- d) Know your character’s crucible
B. The Character Arc - Basic refresher
C. Big Black Moment and the Character Arc
- a) The first three chapters—a setup
- b) Pivot points
- c) Putting it all together
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