On Epiphanies

Oh Ah just a little bit

The difference between realisations and epiphanies is the difference between oh and ah.

Let me explain.

Yesterday, I quoted the final words of Raymond Carver’s story ‘Fat’:

It is August.

My life is going to change. I feel it.

Succinct. Expansive. Moving.

Carver’s influence in the 1980s led to a lot a lot of stories that ended in epiphanies — that is, moments of wider or deeper comprehension.

In Conversations with Raymond Carver, Jim Spencer has Carver invoking Chekhov:

‘and suddenly everything became clear to him.’

It’s a quote Carver had on a 3x5 card above his workdesk.

An oh moment is about something becoming clear, but an ah moment is about the clarification of everything.

A good general definition of epiphanies comes in Write Right: Creative Writing Using Storytelling Techniques by Kendall F. Haven:

Epiphanies are those flashes of insight, those moments of “Ah-ha!” clarity.

There are three steps to the writing of an epiphany: the set up, the trigger, and the epiphany itself. The set up requires that the character misunderstand their situation, that their view of things be erroneous. They must then act based on that erroneous view. The best epiphanies come from characters who erroneously believe the exact opposite of the true state of affairs.

The trigger is an incident or moment which reveals the character’s erroneous thinking and, thus, precipitates the epiphany. The epiphany is the moment of clarity, of understanding.

(I prefer ah to ah-ha, which is a little Magic Circle for my liking.)

If you want to read a very clear three-stage epiphany story, have a look at John Updike’s ‘Pigeon Feathers’. It follows all these steps.

The set up: Boy believes in God but Boy loses faith through reading an atheistic book.

The trigger: Boy is sent out to shoot birds.

The epiphany: Boy regains faith through witnessing the created beauty of a shot bird’s feathers.

As he fitted the last two, still pliant, on the top, and stood up, crusty coverings were lifted from him, and with a feminine, slipping sensation along his nerves that seemed to give the air hands, he was robed in this certainty: that the God who had lavished such craft upon these worthless birds would not destroy His whole Creation by refusing to let David live forever.

Textbook.

Updike makes it seem hard to get wrong.

But when writing, or trying to write, an epiphany story, the easiest mistake to make is having your character realise something specific and then going no further.

For example, your character might realise, at the end of an event-filled anniversary celebration, that they were trapped in an unhappy marriage.

That’s an oh moment.

Oh, I see, I’m thwarted and violently angry, and it’s because I’m stuck with stupid.

But this isn’t an epiphany. Because it’s to do with a fact about their situation. The fact of the link between their unhappiness and their marriage.

The epiphany comes if and when the character realises, say, that it is a universal truth that the fulfilment of youthful desires (marriage) can lead to mature regrets (unhappiness).

Ah, I see, the world is full of very thwarted, very angry, very married people.

They have seen their way through to what Chaucer’s Wife of Bath calls the ‘woe that is in marriage’ — a widespread woe in a shared condition.

This is an epiphany because it’s to do with a truth about the world. The truth of the link between desire and disappointment.

Of course, an epiphany almost certainly has to springboard off from a simple realisation. The story needs the awful anniversary shenanigans, the drunkenness, the argument and the still moment beneath the tree in the garden. But unless it makes that final leap, it remains stuck in oh rather than reaching up into the higher realms of ah!

The real killer is that we’re now so used to epiphany stories that it takes an epiphany beyond an epiphany — perhaps a meta-epiphany — to get through to us, to bring us back to ground.

Ah, epiphanies are sometimes truths as well as epiphanies.