Seeing the Light
By Dave King | May 21, 2024 |
Courtesy of Jeffery, Creative Commons.
Let me tell you about a manuscript I worked on early in my career as an editor– actually when I was still apprenticing under my co-author, Renni Browne. This was back when manuscripts were still on paper and editing was done with a pencil, so both the title and the author’s name are lost to the mists of time. I’d give spoiler warnings, but I have no idea if the manuscript ever published.
Yet, this story still sticks with me decades later.
The manuscript was a fantasy set in a society on another planet with roughly renaissance-level development — well-organized city states governed by a strong, universal legal and moral code. The story is told from the point of view of an inspector – something between an inquisitor and a detective – who is called in after a soldier killed a disabled, local boy who he said threatened him. The boy’s grandmother, a retired soldier in her own right, pulls her weapons out of storage, kills the soldier who killed her grandson, then disappears. The inspector is charged with bringing her to justice.
But as he digs into the case, he discovers that justice lies on the grandmother’s side. The soldier was drunk when he killed the young boy, who was innocent. Worse, the platoon leader tried to sweep the whole thing under the rug. The inspector discovers this when the grandmother, recognizing that he’s an honorable man, sneaks into his room at night and tells him her side of the story. So despite constant pressure, the inspector refuses to back down and declare the murdering soldier innocent because that would make him complicit in the coverup. The pressure is not unreasonable, since under their laws, every unit in the army maintains its cohesion by becoming a unified whole. If one member is dishonored, all are dishonored. This means that if he judges against the platoon leader, he would be condemning every other member of the platoon to death. Still, he feels that supporting a lie would corrupt their entire society, and he cannot do it. He has no choice but to stick with the truth.
The story comes to a head when the grandmother again comes out of hiding, kills several other members of the platoon, and is shot herself. Afterwards, as the inspector is preparing the report exonerating her, the company commander orders him to let it go, to declare the soldier innocent and the grandmother guilty, for the good of everyone. Once again, he is alone, fighting for honor against the corruption and lies that would destroy everything he believes in. He feels he has no choice but to declare the company commander has fallen into dishonor.
And then, in one sudden flash, he sees that he has just condemned thousands of soldiers to their deaths. And he just can’t do it. He leaves his report unfinished and simply walks away from the situation, the army, his career as an inspector, and his entire life.
So what makes this epiphany brilliant enough that it’s still with me 35 years later?
First, it comes as a complete surprise. Plot twists in general work best when you can’t see them coming, and that’s particularly true of the moments when a character transforms their life. When your readers can see what a character needs to learn pages (or chapters) before they do, they’re likely to feel the character should just get on with it. The best epiphanies hit like revelation.
To pull that off, you need to immerse your readers in your character’s worldview. The way they feel pre-epiphany has to seem normal enough that readers accept it without question. Last months, I wrote how a narcissistic character eventually learned to open up to other people. This transformation came as a surprise to readers because the early scenes written from the character’s point of view made his narcissism feel natural. A bit odd, perhaps, but understandable.
Of course, if a character clearly needs to learn something, you can generate some tension over whether they will or not. But to pull that off, you can’t simply have your character refuse to learn their lesson because they’re stupid or stubborn. They have to have plausible reasons, rooted in their character, for not changing in a way that would improve their life.
Another thing that makes the inspector’s epiphany so jolting is how much of the story it reinterprets in an instant. All epiphanies mean seeing what came before in a new light – the word comes from the Greek word for “to reveal.” Usually it’s just some aspect of a character’s personally, some past behavior that seemed natural and reasonable at the time but now seems self-destructive. But with the inspector’s story, all of the plot tension had been built on the bedrock of his moral code. Readers accepted without question that he was the honorable one, fighting against the corruption he found all around him, and the main source of tension in the plot was whether or not he could preserve his honor. When he and readers discover in the end that his moral code is not honorable, everything the story had been based on until that moment is turned upside-down.
But the author was able to pull this off because the inspector’s core character did not change. He was an honorable man within to code of conduct he accepted without question. When he rejected that code, he did so out of the same sense of honor that led him to dedicate his life to it in the first place. His character anchored the story while everything else was upended.
The strongest plot twists are the ones that most transform how readers understand the story. The denouement of most mysteries involves the reinterpretation of facts to reveal that someone readers thought was innocent is actually guilty. A lot of spy thrillers build to the point where readers learn that events they thought they understood were being manipulated from behind the scenes. But if you can transform the very foundations of your story, changing their sense of who a main character actually is and what their life means, then you’ve not only shown your readers an epiphany, you’ve invited them to share one.
And, as I can attest, that can stay with them for decades.
So what are your favorite fictional epiphanies? What did they transform?
Dave King has been editing for nearly 40 years now. He is co-author of Self-Editing for Fiction Writers, a former contributing editor to Writer’s Digest, and has contributed more than 100 articles over the last 12 years to Writer Unboxed. He lives on 25 acres in rural Massachusetts with his business partner and wife, Ruth Julian, who also edits his work. His other day job, at least on Sundays, is as the organist at a Lutheran church in Greenfield, Mass.
[coffee]
This is great, Dave—I’ll share it with my writing students.
I guess the most memorable jaw-dropper for me was in Karma Brown’s Come Away With Me. The protagonist was very pregnant with her first child when black ice causes an accident that the baby didn’t survive. This threw her into understandably complicated grief, since the husband she adored had been driving the car. We sense her anger with him in their dialogue exchanges. We see him giving her room to heal, time to spend alone with her parents. She wears a necklace with a locket that has ashes within it. He reminds her that they had a jar of destination activities that they’ve always wanted to do together, and he encourages her to go, but on her own. Near the end of the journey, she takes a surfing lesson in Hawaii and loses the necklace. She is hysterical over it—and it’s then that we learn that her husband had died too, and some of his ashes had been mixed with some of the baby’s ashes in that locket.
Of course this makes you go back and reread everything! It’s only then that you realize that he ducks out when other people are coming to the apartment, etc. But I tell you, I did not see that one coming at all. (For those of you who still have it in your TBR pile, I apologize that your shock will now be lessened, but you are writers—now you know what to look for in the set up!)
Yes, that’s what I’m talking about. The anger that had been driving the story becomes a grief-induced madness. And, I’m guessing, seeing this allows her to start to heal? That’s an effective epiphany.
I loved that book, too, and was totally surprised at the end.
Your post and Kathryn’s comment made me think of Daphne Du Maurier’s Don’t Look Now. I read it recently and because I couldn’t recall the details of hne movie, I got that jarring whammo at the end. Nothing was what it seemed and yet it all made sense, even before I went back and combed through the clues which, in hindsight, were almost obvious. Thank you both for today’s inspiration!
The real trick — and the thing that makes Ms. Du Maurier so celebrated — is right there: “Nothing was what it seemed, and yet it all made sense.” That is immensely tricky to do.
This isn’t technically an epiphany — John doesn’t realize something about himself. But it is pretty epiphany adjacent. I’m thinking of writing more about plot twists in general next month, so watch this space.
Great post, Dave and encouraging. For in my “forever” novel which I am now querying, I have such a twist, that only one character knows about. The reader might begin to guess, but I don’t think so. It is fun to create this hidden story line, to watch it grow and expand until late in the novel all is revealed. And you, Kathryn remembering these…that’s what it is all about. Surprise captures the reader and won’t let go.
Perhaps because it’s the moments in our own life when we recognize something that we’ve failed to see that make these fictional moments so memorable. After all, when you see something new and true about yourself, that’s where growth happens.
Man, I love this post, Dave. Sharing in my newsletter for authors–such great insight into what makes stories–and characters–endure. I hope you find the author/title!
I kind of have a hope that the author will recognize himself (it was a man, I remember) and volunteer. But I rather doubt it.
As a further clue, the world he created was based on an extension of Canticle for Leibowitz, Walter Miller’s 1959 science fiction triptych. The novel contained a frame story in which the inspector, years after the incident, met with a monk from an order that, while unnamed, looks a lot like the Blessed Order of St. Leibowitz, who hears his story and then helps him to heal in the end.
I really enjoyed Canticle of Leibowitz. When I did a search for books like it–I didn’t see any stories like the summary you shared.
The author had written a couple of novellas based on the Liebowitz world, though this was the best. It’s one of my regrets that the work never saw print.
Love this post and how you remember a story from long ago…I hope you are able to find it. The story that made me go right back to the beginning was The Sixth Sense. I didn’t see the twist until it was revealed and it all made sense.
The Sixth Sense is another classic example of the kind of twist that rewrites the story from the beginning.
The big reveal in my second published novel, NETHERWORLD, is how one main character guides another into figuring out what the third main character did – by insisting on NOT telling him what she is pretty sure is the solution, and that HE figure it out himself.
That has been something the reader has watched developing:
“Something ye’re trying to say?” He peered at her. “Say it.”
“Years from now, when you’re looking back at this night, there can’t be anything which I injected into your drama. I am not a party to it.”
“It’s me mess, Bianca’s and me own.”
“Yes. No one else was there.”
He figures it out – and his entire life and planned future do a 180° turn.
But the reader has known all along, and has been waiting for the explosion. And it comes very, very close to him NOT figuring it out.
The entire third volume in the trilogy is dealing with the debris.
Sounds like a good one, Alicia.
This is tough, Dave, because twists are quite common–almost required in some genres–but epiphanies seem to me to be few, in life or literature. Except maybe in religious terms.
It’s true that twists are far more common than epiphanies, probably because they are less common in real life. Characters, like people, need to learn to grow. But usually, before someone reaches the point of transforming their life, they have to be pushed toward extremes — epiphanies never come easy. That alone would make them less common.