On Writing Romance_ How to Craft a Novel That Sells - Leigh Michaels [122]
Similarly, villains should be punished in proportion to their crimes. A character who has committed murder should receive a different level of justice than one who has robbed a store.
That said, no matter how bad the villain is, his ultimate downfall usually comes about because of his own actions. If the villain ends up stabbed to death, it's generally not because the hero set out to kill him but because the villain aimed a cowardly blow at the hero and it backfired. Or the villain may have moved at the wrong moment and turned a shot that the hero intended to wound into a fatal one. The hero and heroine remain heroic and humane, within the context of the situation, even when threatened.
In this example from Claire Delacroix's single-title historical The Warrior, the villain, Dubhglas, is just about to kill the hero and is taunting him with the lie that he has raped the heroine, Aileen, when she takes matters into her own hands:
"No!" Aileen cried, tipped the arrow into the flames, then loosed it directly at Dubhglas. He turned at the sound of her voice, his movement ensuring that the arrow caught him in the other eye.
Notice that though Aileen shot him, it was Dubhglas's own action that caused the true severity of his injury—having lost one eye to an earlier skirmish, he loses the remaining one here because he moves in relation to the path of the arrow.
THE BLACK MOMENT
All the twists and turns of the short-term problem, all the character-building difficulties, all the foreshadowing and suspense and love scenes lead eventually to the black moment, the point in the story at which it seems impossible that the long-term problem can ever be solved. This is the deep, horrible moment when all appears lost, when either the hero or the heroine has turned to walk away (figuratively, at least), and it appears there will be no happy ending.
In her short contemporary Expecting Lonergan's Baby, Maureen Child shows us a heroine who faces the truth about her hero and, understanding his shortcomings, sends him away—even though it's the last thing she wants to do:
His features tightened and Maggie felt [Sam] emotionally withdraw. She wanted to cry but knew it wouldn't help. She wanted to reach him and knew that though he was standing right in front of her, he was further away from her than ever.
And just like that, a piece of her heart died. Swallowing back the tears gathering in her throat, she said only, "I don't want a husband who thinks it's his duty to marry me. ... I think it's best if you leave at the end of summer, just as you planned. I don't want you to be a part of the baby's life." ...
Then she turned and hurried across the moonlit yard to her own house. Stepping inside, she closed the door behind her and leaned back against it.
Knees weak, heart breaking, she closed her eyes and gave herself up to the pain.
Maggie understands that marrying the man she loves will lead only to his resentment of her. Refusing Sam's proposal isn't a ploy or an effort to manipulate him into changing; so far as she can see, it's the end of their relationship. And because the heroine has given up hope, the readers momentarily give up, too.
In order to be most effective, the black moment should arise naturally from the conflict and the plot, not be a manufactured confrontation or a misunderstanding. In this case, Sam is reluctant to commit himself because he blames himself for the long-ago death of a cousin; he is hesitant to accept so much responsibility again.
The black moment is often placed at the end of the next-to-last chapter, where it allows enough space for the readers to fully experience and understand the characters' pain. The black moment also serves to draw the readers into the rest of the book, and it gives the characters twenty pages or so to come to grips with the importance of what has happened to them and the