I am deep in writing Pair Alleles, Book Four in my Derivatives of Displacement series. I’m just under a third of the way through and on a tight schedule. I’m writing more by feel and less by outline for this novel as I work to find my story and I’ve been thinking a lot about what Robert McKee calls scene “turns” or what Shaun Coyne of Story Grid fame calls polarity and value shifts.

According to McKee and Coyne, every scene in a story or novel must have a turn or polarity or value shift in or...