The crisis of a book is a choice faced by the protagonist. In the climax, the choice is made. Denuement is everything that comes after the choice is made and everything changes.
I am going to give you two detailed examples of the crisis choice in action in two very different ways in two short stories.
The first is a chilling tale by Joyce Carol Oates called, “Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?” The protagonist of the story is a fifteen-year-old girl named Connie who “knew she was pretty and that was everything.” In the beginning she has no respect for her mother “who hadn’t much reason any longer to look at her own face . . . now her looks were gone” or her sister June who “was twenty-four and still lived at home.”
A creepy guy named Arnold Friend, who she’d been flirting with earlier, shows up at her house one day when she is home along, having declined to go to a family barbeque with her parents and sister. He tells her that he is going to take her out: “I’m your lover, honey.” She tries to bluff that her father is coming back to get her, but he knows exactly where her family is and that they are not coming back soon. He tries to lure her out of the house; he will not break in unless she calls the police. He says, ” . . . give me your hand, and nobody else gets hurt, I mean your nice old bald-headed daddy and your mummy and your sister in her high heels. Because listen: why bring them into this?”
This sets up the choice. Connie can put her entire family into serious harm’s way or she can go with Arnold Friend. She asks him what he will do to her: “‘Just two things, or maybe three,’ Arnold Friend said. ‘But I promise it won’t last long and you’ll like me the way you get to like people your close to. You will. It’s all over for you here, so come on out .You don’t want your people in any trouble, do you?'”
This is a choice between two irreconcilable evils. “She thought, I have to think. I have to know what to do.”
The scene continues to build until:
She put her hand against the screen. She watched herself push to door slowly open as if she were safe back somewhere in the other doorway, watching this body and this head of long hair moving out into the sunlight where Arnold Friend waited.
There’s a short paragraph more, but the choice has been made and the story–of her life–is over. We learn so much about her character from watching her make this painful choice, and the foolish, shallow girl with whom we began the story transforms into someone who trades her own well-being for her family’s.
Here’s a happier choice. This is a wonderful story called “Which is More Than I Can Say About Some People” by Lorrie Moore. A woman named Abby is promoted in her job from creating test questions to giving speeches in high schools about how to prepare for tests. She and her mother go to Ireland to kiss the Blarney Stone in order to be given the gift of gab. There’s a lot to this story, including some trouble around kissing the stone, and I’ll leave you to read it, but here’s where the final choice comes in:
“Well, look at you!” said Abby. “Do you feel eloquent and confident, now that you’ve kissed the stone?”
“Not really.” Mrs. Mallon shrugged.
Now that they had kissed it, or sort of, would they become self-conscious? What would they end up talking about?
Movies, probably. Just as they always had at home. Movies with scenery, movies with songs.
“How about you?” asked Mrs. Mallon.
“Well,” said Abby, “mostly I feel like we’ve caught strep throat. And yet, and yet . . . ” Here she sat up and leaned forward. No tests, or radio quizzes, or ungodly speeches, or songs brain-dead with biography, or kooky prayers, or shouts, or prolix conversations that with drink and too much time always revealed how stupid and mean even the best people were, just simply this: “A toast. I feel a toast coming on.” [Bolding is mine.]
Here the choice is subtle, but it is NOT either to change or not to change. It is, instead, either to become self-conscious and try to act normal, to try to reiterate their given roles, to talk about movies OR to take up the blessing of the Blarney Stone and become eloquent, make a toast, change. It is important that we see, above, what explicitly is at stake, what specifically trying not to change looks like and does to the characters. Acting normal might save the dignity of both women. They are in danger of cracking apart their senses of self, and restoring the normal would feel comforting after the ridiculous trials they’ve put themselves through. But it would be disappointing, too, to have sought change and failed to grasp it. It would be the end of hope, in a sense. If, on the other hand, the Blarney Stone worked–that would be quite a gift. But a toast could change everything. Or it could be just another misguided attempt at change, a failed attempt. Hope could be destroyed even more fully in this way. So each side of the choice has risks and rewards.
Abby realizes that not having toasts at her wedding had been a mistake:
It wasn’t that such ceremonies were important in and of themselves. They were nothing. They were zeros. But they were zeros as placeholders; they held numbers and equations intact. And once you underwent them, you could move on, know the empty power of their blessing, and not spend time missing them.
From here on in, she would believe in toasts.
This is her choice.
The final few paragraphs of the story give us Abby working up to and making a toast, and her mother receiving it. Their relationship has transformed, each woman’s sense of herself in the world is both more real and new.
Think about your own character. What choice is he or she up against at the end of your book? Are both sides compelling or difficult? Do both sides have risks and rewards, dangers and desserts? If it’s an easy or obvious choice, it’s not really a choice. Choices push people and reveal character. Have fun!