You read back through your big ending and it's... disappointing. Technically, it hits all the right beats, but it feels kinda meh. So you make it bigger. You add more dialogue, more stakes, more feelings. And somehow it gets worse. In episode 14, I'm walking you through why the scene that actually earns your hero's big moment isn't near the finale at all, and why you might have already cut it for "not moving the plot forward".

You'll learn:

• Why making your ending bigger (more dialogue, more stakes, more feelings) only makes it feel more forced
• What the "porch scene" is and why your reader will feel it even when your hero never acknowledges what's happening
• How a hero uses their Augmentation to show (not tell) you they're actually changing
• The one question to run on your mid-story scenes this week to tell whether your hero is really growing or just wearing a different emotional outfit

This 30-minute episode is for romance writers who can tell your ending isn't hitting the way the way you intended, and you've been trying to fix it by adding more. By the end, you'll know why that instinct backfires and where in your draft the real character-growth work needs to happen instead.

Resources from this episode:

• Related article: Why some heroes wreck you (and others are forgettable) → podcast.suebrownmoore.com/heroes-that-wreck-you
• Related article: The four stages of a Turning Point moment → podcast.suebrownmoore.com/turning-point
• Related article: The 5 stages of your hero's growth arc → podcast.suebrownmoore.com/5-phases
• Related article: The 4 types of Augmentations (hero self-protections) → podcast.suebrownmoore.com/armor
• Learn the timeline dot method: Cake, Not Chaos: The Moment To Moment Method workshop replay (live inside E2E) → podcast.suebrownmoore.com/expert
• Community: Join Enemies to Experts → podcast.suebrownmoore.com/expert
• More Resources: Learn from Sue at your own pace → podcast.suebrownmoore.com/learn

• Why Some Heroes Wreck You (& Others Are Unforgettable)
• The 4 stages of the Turning Point moment
• Hero “Armor” (Augmentations CCV) - Free article: The 4 types of hero defenses that affect your story’s scenes → podcast.suebrownmoore.com/armor
• Liar, Liar, Plot on Fire - Learn about my workshop course and the 5 questions to diagnose plot problems → podcast.suebrownmoore.com/liar-liar
• Enemies To Experts™ - Learn more about the Enemies To Experts™ program with Sue Brown-Moore. Because falling in love with your manuscript starts with understanding it.
• The 5 Growth Phases - Free article: The 5 stages of every character arc → podcast.suebrownmoore.com/5-phases

Subscribe to the Story Sorcery® podcast with Sue Brown-Moore on your favorite podcast app to never miss an episode.

She's sitting on a porch alone, hands folded loosely in her lap.

The sun is going down in the field across the street, and the wood

of the bench is still warm on her thighs from the afternoon heat.

She's not reaching for her phone.

She's not rehearsing the conversation she's supposed to have tomorrow.

She's not getting up to grab something from inside that

she doesn't actually need.

She's just sitting there.

And the woman we met in chapter one of this same story could not have given

herself this moment of peace and quiet.

If you've ever read back through the big climax scene in your romance

and thought, okay, this technically works, but it just doesn't feel as

powerful as it should, stick around until the end of this episode.

Because the scene where your hero is actually becoming their transformed

self, where they're growing those wings that will let them fly, that

scene might be hiding in plain sight.

Sometimes the quiet moments do more for your story than the loud ones.

And today I'm going to show you how to see it in your own manuscript.

Last episode we talked about the four types of Augmentations:

Armor, Shield, Mask, and Flair.

Those protective behaviors your characters use, sometimes without

even knowing they're doing it.

And I told you that when a character's Augmentation starts to break down,

that's where your best writing and your most emotional moments shine through.

So today we're going to look at what that Augmentation breaking-down

process can look like in a quiet scene.

The kind with no confrontation, no confession, no expectation

from the character.

Because when a Flair hero sits still and doesn't fill the silence, they're doing

emotional work that no one else can see.

If we haven't met, hello, I'm Sue Brown-Moore.

I've worked as a developmental editor in romantic fiction for over a

decade, and I happen to be a chronic overthinker about, well, everything.

But especially about how we as flawed humans hide from the things that scare us.

Which is also what makes the romantic heroes you're

writing feel real on the page.

But the hero doesn't just jump from scared to confident.

Their mindset changes throughout the story, and there is one moment where

that hero hits a point of no return, where they can no longer make decisions

like their old self would have.

In today's episode, we're exploring a quiet moment just before that

Turning Point, a scene that shows the hero doing real transformative

work in an unexpected way.

And if all of that sounds like what you want to be doing in

your stories, but maybe you're just not there yet, that's okay.

I wanna help you get there.

So just as an example, let's say this is where you are right now.

You write the ending you've been building towards since chapter three.

The moment where your hero says the thing or does the thing or picks the person.

On paper, it seems right.

It feels perfect.

You hit all the major trope beats, and you checked all the plot boxes.

But when you read that scene back.

It's kind of mid, it's average.

So you make it bigger.

You layer in more dialogue, more feelings, higher stakes.

And somehow that just makes it worse.

What might be happening here is that the story is only showing

the hero's highlight reel.

Kind of like watching a workout montage in a movie where the hero goes

from bumbling to buff in 30 seconds.

We don't get to see the ice baths or the morning meditations or the way

their mindset about food changes.

But you can't have the big moments without the small ones.

They don't feel earned.

You might already be putting these quiet scenes into your

story without realizing it.

You might even have edited out a few, thinking they

weren't pulling their weight.

So first we're going back to that hero on the porch that I opened with, the

very start of this episode, and I'm gonna walk you through that whole scene.

Then I'll explain what a Turning Point is in a story and why you need quiet

moments like this one to show your readers what's actually happening

underneath all the external turmoil.

So that your hero can earn their Turning Point moment.

And at the end, I'll give you one question to ask about your own quiet

scenes to tell whether your hero is doing real personal growth work in the

mid story, or if the big Turning Point moment later is going to feel unearned.

Let's talk about what a scene like this might feel like first.

Because you might not have a quiet porch scene in your story.

But as a human who has worked through your own personal struggles,

you've had those moments of growth.

And they ride on a complex feeling of hope and fear.

When you read back through that big scene that's supposed to bring all the

feels to your story but doesn't, that feeling of disconnect might be because

your hero isn't actually that different now than she was in chapter one.

Her circumstances are different.

She's in a different place, with different people, saying different words.

But the person saying those words could be the same one as from the first chapter,

just maybe wearing a different outfit.

So here's what I think is going on when that happens.

Those big consequential scenes, confessions, confrontations, life-changing

choices, those scenes are loud.

Which means that if you don't understand why they are loud, you might be

tempted to just turn up the volume.

A volume increase is a technical tweak.

It changes the performance of a scene.

Even a page one, phase one, untransformed hero can perform being a changed person.

Our example woman from the porch might have sat on that bench and watched the

sunset, but her interior experience would have been a jumble of anxiety

and stress, not the centered awareness of just sitting with her thoughts.

What your page one hero cannot fake is the feeling of personal growth.

Their Augmentation lets them perform that growth.

It lets them seem to be doing one thing, while they're actually feeling another.

But what we have to look at is what she reaches for when she's uncomfortable,

the way she behaves to keep herself safe.

So if your hero's Augmentation is Flair, so she's the one that fills

every silence, cracks the joke before anybody else can speak, pumps up the

energy in every room she walks into.

Then true stillness may be really hard for her.

Maybe it's not just uncomfortable.

Maybe it contradicts the entire internal logic of how she survives every day.

So when she sits on a porch alone and doesn't fill the

silence, she's not just relaxing.

She's showing you that the fear underneath her Flair isn't calling the shots anymore.

While an Augmentation can perform personal growth, it can't

replicate the experience of it.

And that experience of knowing who you are inside has changed

does not need an audience.

It doesn't need a witness to be true.

All it needs is for your hero to start seeing what's possible when

their fear isn't running the show.

Which is why, even if you have a quiet scene like this one in

your own manuscript, you might just scroll right past it.

You might dismiss it as fluff or cut it because it doesn't seem

like it's moving the plot forward.

Because nothing happens in it in the traditional sense.

There's just a woman sitting on a porch, thinking.

But this is the scene that shows the reader that your hero is truly evolving.

This is the scene that earns the big splashy moment you

wrote three chapters later.

It's also the scene where your reader will feel something, that

connection to the hero, even when she can't tell you why or what it was.

So let's go back to that porch.

Because I really want you to feel this quiet moment with our hero.

She's the kind of woman who loves to fill silences.

Because silence feels dangerous.

She puts on a big personality in public, and that's how she's coped

with her insecurities for a long time.

You might know someone like this.

Maybe she's you.

She rehearses conversations in the car on the way to work.

She writes a text she's never gonna send.

She fills her own silences, laughing at nothing, humming,

narrating her own day like she's got a podcast running in her head.

Even alone in her closet, getting dressed, she's putting on a show for

an audience that isn't there, making sure she moves in just the right way

and chooses just the right thing, even if she's not leaving the house.

Because her true audience is her own inner critic.

And that silence is where that crippling criticism lives.

So she fills it.

All the time.

And she doesn't even know she's doing it.

In her story, she's been filling silences just like this for most of the book.

She made a joke at her brother's funeral.

She picked a fight that she actually wanted to have.

She rehearsed an apology for six days before delivering it in the wrong

tone, because she was so focused on performing her I'm Sorry that she

didn't notice the person she was apologizing to had already forgiven her.

Just because she uses Flair to protect herself doesn't mean

she's not a genuine person.

At her core, she was already warm, funny, and vibrant.

Her friends mean it when they say the party gets better the minute she walks in.

This is not a character wearing a costume.

It's just that her big personality is doing double duty.

It's keeping her too busy to deal with that inner critic that can tear her down

better than any mean girl ever could.

We talked about this in more depth in Episode 13 with my personal example and

the one from a published romance book.

So go back and check that out if you missed it.

But back to the porch.

Our hero is at her grandmother's house.

Memaw passed away last winter, the only person who ever made her truly

feel seen, and the house is hers now.

She doesn't know how to feel about that.

All of her memories of this place are jumbled and caught up in her grief.

It's early evening, still hot out.

The wood of the porch bench is warm under her thighs where

her shorts have ridden up.

She can feel the grain of it.

She remembers when her grandfather made this bench.

And you can still feel the rough spots where he didn't quite finish sanding it.

A mosquito is buzzing somewhere nearby.

The leaves on the big oak in the front yard are swaying just enough to notice.

A dog is barking from the neighbor's house.

And she doesn't yell at that dog.

She doesn't swat at that mosquito.

She doesn't go inside for the citronella candle she knows

is on the kitchen counter.

She doesn't pull out her phone to scroll TikTok.

She doesn't start telling herself the story of what this porch used to be,

when times were easier and simpler.

She just breathes in the smell of honeysuckle and cut grass on the breeze.

Tunes out the dog and lets herself feel.

The sun drops another inch, and she admires the streaks of

pink and peach and baby blue.

And as the afternoon fades to twilight, she recognizes that she actually

likes this version of herself.

She realizes that the way she's been protecting herself—that casual

personal cruelty, the relentless drive to be perfect in everything,

the refusal to show even an ounce of vulnerability—never made her feel

this peaceful and centered and happy.

She's not deciding anything, and she's not performing.

She's just sitting with herself and getting comfortable with who she

actually is underneath the Flair.

And the woman we met in chapter one of this story could not have done this.

Chapter One her would already be on her phone.

Or she'd have gotten up to water the plants for the third time today.

She'd have called her sister, not because she wanted to talk, but because

sitting with the silence that Memaw used to fill would have been unbearable.

She'd be narrating the sunset out loud.

Look at that.

Isn't that something?

Turning even a sunset she's watching alone into a small

performance for an audience of one.

But she's not doing any of that right now.

And this moment is frozen in time.

Even the breeze has stilled.

She's at peace with herself for the first time in forever.

And remember what I told you at the end of last episode, Episode 13, that when a

character's Augmentation starts to crack, that's where your best writing and your

most emotional moments shine through?

This is what that looks like.

You could write this whole scene in three paragraphs that's part of another scene.

It doesn't have to be its own full thing.

It doesn't need dialogue or other characters.

It doesn't even need the hero herself to think about how she's changed.

She doesn't have to know it's happening, but your reader knows.

That reader's throat will tighten up a little.

Her chest might feel kind of heavy.

She may even tear up.

And she reads the scene twice.

Not because she missed something, but because she wants to

stay in it, with the hero.

And when she closes the book at the end of the chapter, she sits there

for a minute, just like our hero.

Feeling all the feels until she's ready to move on with her day.

That's the story purpose of a scene like this.

And if you've been seeding your hero's performances through all the previous

parts of the book, you don't even have to explain the porch scene to the reader.

That before and after contrast is what does the heavy lifting.

Your reader has been watching this hero put on a show, chapter after

chapter, and now on the porch she's quiet and still and centered.

And as readers, our bodies will feel that contrast before

our brain recognizes the why.

The porch scene we just walked through is not a Turning Point.

That Turning Point is coming.

It's probably already in your story or your outline.

It's that moment where your hero makes a choice they could not have made in

chapter one, a point of no return, where they walk away from the life

their fear has driven them to build.

In a true Turning Point moment, there is no going back.

Because the hero has fundamentally changed.

The person they are now recognizes the misery of living the way they used to.

And they are no longer willing to walk that path.

Because the pain of being their older self, their pre-transformation self, is

worse than the pain of facing their fear.

The Turning Point is not a simple moment of refusal.

It's a recognition of self transformation, and the porch scene is not that moment.

Because the hero isn't ready yet to face that point of no return.

The porch scene is the headspace that paves the way for the Turning Point

so that the hero's big moment doesn't feel like it came out of nowhere.

Think of it like this.

The Turning Point is where your hero picks up the pen and signs the contract.

The porch scene is where she sits with the paperwork long enough to realize

she actually wants what it promises and is willing to give up what is required.

If your hero skips their porch scene and goes straight to the

signing, your reader will feel it.

Even if they don't know what's technically missing from the story, they're still

going to experience the emotional gap that this kind of quiet self-recognition

scene brings to the depth of the hero.

The promise of the story will feel empty, and that big flashing

moment won't mean anything.

This is why some big climax scenes and sequences in stories

feel earned and some feel forced.

The ones that feel earned, show the hero recognizing what life could feel

like on the other side of their fear.

And that moment, or series of moments, lives upstream in the story.

The character has to do that recognition and acceptance work on themself in

the scenes before their big moment.

Now, I'm not saying that you have to have a literal porch scene, but you do

at least need a scene where readers can experience your hero recognizing and

accepting their reality, and then seeing a future beyond their current misery.

Depending on the length of your story and what growth arc phase your page

one hero starts in, you might have one combo scene that fills this story

need, or you might have a series of them, like a little tasting menu,

that convinces your hero over time.

I teach the character growth arc in five distinct phases.

And the porch scene and these kinds of self-awareness scenes usually

need to happen In the late mid story or the early late story.

In My Liar, Liar, Plot on Fire course and the May module of my Enemies to

Experts program, I show a graph of where the Turning Point lives on the five

phase growth arc. If you aren't part of these programs, look for any scenes

where your hero is considering changing the way they live and make decisions.

This is phase three of their growth arc.

In a traditional three-act romance plot structure, this usually happens in the

second half of act two of your manuscript, where your hero is working through

what they want versus why they want it.

You can also place these quiet porch-style scenes in phase four of the

growth arc, which typically happens, in that same three-act structure

traditional style, in the early part of Act three, when the hero is just

starting to commit to that permanent change, trying it on for size first.

This self-awareness scene is the bridge between when the hero is starting to

consider change in that early phase three of their growth arc and connects to

where they are fully committed to living that change in late phase four of their

growth arc. If that's confusing, take a look at that visual I mentioned earlier.

For some heroes, this bridge can happen in a single scene.

That's usually only possible if the heroes started their story with

a growth arc already in progress.

But for heroes who need to both recognize their fear and accept their change,

you probably need several scenes, sprinkled through a few different

chapters, usually in the mid-story.

What matters is that something quiet happens on page before that

Turning Point moment so that the big exciting finale will feel authentic.

If you've got a late story scene in your manuscript that feels like it's

missing something, like the choice is right but the emotion is underwhelming,

you're probably missing a mid-story scene somewhere earlier in the manuscript.

A great way to check this pacing is to lay out all your important character growth

moments on a timeline as little dots.

Then do the same for your plot timeline, your trope timelines,

and your romance beats.

And when you overlay all of those timelines together as one flat

single timeline, you can see which parts of your story have gaps

and which parts are too crowded.

I teach this technique in my Cake, Not Chaos: The Moment To Moment

Method workshop, if you want to learn how to do it for your story.

I've been talking a lot about the turning point in this episode, and it's

something that I have articles on and I teach in several of my workshops.

One of the things I've learned through creating all of these

resources is that the Turning Point is more complex than it sounds.

A Turning Point moment actually has four different stages happening inside of it.

I wrote a full article about what these four stages are and how they

work at the scene level, and I will link that for you in the show notes.

That article is going to be most useful once you've got your mid-story

character growth work sorted out.

Because if the self-awareness scene or scenes aren't in place, mapping

out the Turning Point stages won't fix your story's weak ending.

Your porch scene is the quiet growth that earns the finale payoff.

The Turning Point is what delivers it.

So you need both.

If you're already a member of Enemies to Experts, you can use this

self-awareness scene we just talked about alongside the Turning Point Test

exercise you learned inside the program.

The test helps you look at your hero's Turning Point and figure

out whether they could have made that choice in chapter one or not.

If they could not have, the test passes and your hero's Turning Point is earned.

Sometimes the test passes and the scene still feels a little off, maybe a little

weak, maybe like something's missing.

That's usually when you need to look for that self-awareness work

upstream and see if it needs to be tightened or strengthened.

So this episode and the Turning Point Test are built to work together.

While you're drafting, envision what the self-awareness phase

looks like for your hero.

And be sure it happens before the hero's big moment of no return.

When you're using the Turning Point Test during revisions and the test

passes but the story's finale still feels flat, go back and look for

that gap we just talked about.

Where a quiet scene could show your hero recognizing or accepting

that change could be good for them.

If your story has a muddy or a missing middle, see if it's missing this

self-awareness section, like the porch scene that we talked about today.

If you've never studied the Turning Point before, or if you're still not

sure if your story even has this quiet self-awareness moment, this episode

might have felt a little overwhelming.

And I completely understand.

So here's something simple that you can try this week on your own manuscript.

Open up your story to somewhere around the two thirds mark in your

word count, assuming it's finished.

That's not a hard rule, just a place to start.

If you're writing romantasy or another mashup romance genre with a four-act

plot structure, you might need to start closer to the middle of your word count.

You are looking for a scene where your hero is doing

something quiet, maybe alone.

Somewhere the character is choosing not to do something they

would have done in chapter one.

Once you've found your scene, ask yourself this one question:

Is there a moment in this scene where my hero is recognizing or accepting

something about who they are becoming?

They don't have to be ready to act on that recognition yet, but the scene

needs to portray the character acting differently and maybe even realizing that.

If your answer to that question, are they recognizing or accepting

something about who they're becoming?

If that answer is yes, the hero does recognize something, she sees

a change happening, your scene is doing real work in the story.

Now, I said earlier that sometimes they come in recognizing it.

So in that case, is your hero accepting that she's changing?

So that's the difference in the two different scenarios, depending

on where your hero starts in their growth arc on page one.

But if not, if the answer is no, your hero does not have any sort

of epiphany or recognition, and they're not demonstrating any sort of

personal change, even subconsciously.

Ask yourself if the scene could do that?

Could you revise it to add that depth and that recognition

or that acceptance into it?

Because your big story finale may be falling flat for exactly that gap.

How could you revise this scene for more weight and emotion for your character?

Sometimes you don't have to add more scenes.

Sometimes you just need to revise and deepen what's already there.

So ask yourself, what hasn't changed yet?

What is this hero still not letting themself recognize?

What would they have to face to make their Turning Point feel earned?

And if you don't have a scene like this, look for a place where you can add one in.

It doesn't always have to be complex, and it doesn't always have to be long.

It can be part of a shorter sequence.

If your answer comes easily, trust it.

Your instincts are probably already working this out before your conscious

brain catches up, especially if you are an intuitive storyteller.

And if you struggle to find a scene like this or answer that question,

that's useful information too.

It just means there's a place in your story that needs more attention.

And now you know exactly where to look.

So if you've been staring at a late story scene that feels flat

and you've been trying to fix it by making it bigger, pause.

Pull back earlier in that story's timeline.

Scale down from those big moments.

Find the scene where your hero is not doing the old thing.

If their augmentation is Flair, like I talked about with our

example on the porch, that might be a moment of stillness.

If it's armor, like a CEO, who's always emotionally shut down, it might be where

they let their guard down with someone.

If they're wearing a mask, they might choose to show the real emotions instead

of pretending to be something they're not.

Your hero has to live in that uncomfortable in-between for a

while before they can choose to make different decisions and live

their life in a way that truly makes them happy without the fear.

These are the scenes where your hero is becoming.

And they are necessary for your story to feel full and satisfying to a reader.

I'm Sue Brown-Moore, and what you learned today is another key to

unlock your storytelling instincts.

You don't need to learn more craft.

You just need to trust the writer you already are.

That is Story Sorcery.

Next time, we're going back to the start of your manuscript

to test your early story hero.

Because before your hero can recognize who they're becoming in your porch scene, they

need to make some wrong choices first.

Your instinct might be to protect that hero from looking bad to the reader.

But that wrong decision is the moment your reader first starts to lean in.