Doomed If You Do and Doomed If You Don't

What do you call the moment in a novel when the protagonist is faced with an impossible choice? Is it a turning point or a moment of truth? Graham Salisbury calls it a pigeon moment and anyone who has read his novel, Under the Blood-Red Sun, will understand why.

Right now, my WIP doesn’t have one. At least I don’t know what it will be. Thinking this was a critical flaw in my plan, I hesitated about leaping into the writing. Then I remembered how the moments of truth for other novels popped into my brain. For G&G, I’d written only a few chapters, but I was working on a synopsis for a critique group exercise. That book’s Tough Choice was really a symmetry consideration. If I started here, I had to end there. For CBL, the action involved in the Big Moment came from a Write Night exercise, but the emotional impact didn’t strike me until I actually wrote the scene in the next to last chapter.

So I trudge forward, searching for truth.