David Baldacci is the mega-million bestselling author of Absolute Power, The 6:20 Man, Simply Lies, and many more. Here is his All Is Lost Moment and Epiphanal Moment (my interpretation, not his) derived extremely loosely from his MasterClass on Mystery and Thriller Writing (which I highly recommend.)

I was working on the screenplay for the Steven Seagal movie, Above the Law. I forget who first said this—maybe Steve, maybe the director Andy Davis—but someone piped up, “We need a ‘Turn in your badge and gun’ scene.”

Let me take a break from our Wilderness Passage posts to say a quick thank-you to everyone who ordered a signed copy of Govt Cheese: A Memoir. We’ve sent out twelve hundred so far, all packed by hand and trundled to the UPS store (actually a bunch of stores), in the VIP pack pictured below.

Does escape from our personal Wilderness always entail a gruesome All Is Lost Moment? Must we hit bottom before we can come back up?

One of the primary characteristics of any “passage through the wilderness” is the excruciating belief/certainty, while we’re in it, that it will never end. We have been given a life sentence, we believe, without possibility of parole.

Our passage through the Wilderness may involve action worthy of the next John Wick movie. We may survive IEDs in Afghanistan, divorces in Reno, stretches in Joliet or in a cubicle at Facebook. We may find ourselves brawling in bars in Ibiza, pursuing lovers across the Pampas in Argentina. We may wake up with strange tattoos, or beside even stranger bed-mates. Entire decades can go missing during our Wilderness Passage.

Can there be an All Is Lost Moment in nonfiction?

The year was 1980. I was living in New York and driving a taxicab. The short version is I finished Novel #3 and couldn’t sell it (much like Novels #1 and #2.)

Why do we (so often) need an All Is Lost Moment in our own lives to break through to another level? Can’t we just do it at a happy time? Do we have to push ourselves to the absolute abyss in order for real change to sink in?

Albert Einstein famously said, “No problem can be solved from the same level of consciousness that created it.”