Make A Scene (30 page)

Opening an epiphany scene with a character behaving oddly or under stress or pressure is a very effective technique. It sets the reader up from the get-go to know that in this scene, your protagonist is emotionally volatile—like a fragile chemistry experiment that can all too easily blow up. If you don't immediately open with your protagonist under stress, however, it's good to quickly put pressure on him before too long.

Though character openings are a strong way to begin an epiphany scene, you can also open with strategically chosen setting details or images that foreshadow or set the mood for the epiphany to come. Here's such an example from Janet Fitch's novel
White Oleander,
in which the scene begins with setting and symbolic images.

Seventeen-year-old Astrid—whose poet mother, Ingrid, has been in prison for six years for murdering her lover—has lived through a series of foster homes and undergone terrible traumas. All she has ever wanted was her mother's devoted, unconditional love, which Ingrid has withheld in favor of building Astrid's character. In this scene, Astrid is coming to see her mother after a long absence; her mother is finally up for trial and Astrid is the only witness whose testimony could free her mother. The scene opens with metaphor-laced setting details about fire season in southern California that suggest the trial by fire that Astrid is about to undergo when she sees her mother.

September came with its skirts of fire. Fire up on the Angeles Crest. Fire in Malibu, Altadena. Fire all along the San Gabriels, in the San Gorgonio wilderness, fire was a flaming hoop the city would have to jump through to reach the blues of October.

It was in the furnace of oleander time that Susan finally called. "I had a trial," she explained. "But we're back on track. I've scheduled you a visit, day after tomorrow."

I was tempted to balk, tell her I wasn't available, make things difficult, but in the end I agreed. I was as ready as I would ever be.

The symbolic image of fire is very powerful here, setting up the idea of someone getting burned in the scene to come. There's also the tension of Astrid considering, for the first time, not going to see her mother—which is a little flash of her steadily growing autonomy. She is "tempted to balk" but ultimately she acquiesces with the line "I was as ready as I would ever be" (suggesting she really isn't ready at all). The reader knows that there is a great deal at stake for Astrid in this scene, and the rest of the scene (which we'll discuss later in this chapter) delivers.

DRIVING YOUR CHARACTER TOWARD EPIPHANY

Once you've set up the scene in which your character is unbalanced and worried about the future, you'll need to up the ante on your character to drive him toward that epiphany. Every character will have a unique set of circumstances that add up to epiphany.

Keep in mind that a character will rarely have the intention to change or see the unvarnished truth. Think about how difficult it is to get a person to change a habit like keeping a messy room, or smoking cigarettes, much less a deeper, more internal behavior or belief. Though you'll have done some of this work toward epiphany already by raising the stakes in previous scenes and complicating your protagonist's life and plot, this scene is the one in which the dam must finally break.

Since epiphanies do not come easily, you will have to exert stress, pressure, and tension upon your protagonist to get him there. Here are some forms of pressure:

•Threat of loss.
When your protagonist stands to lose something or someone he holds dear, this is a powerfully motivating force for awareness to come in.

• Incontrovertible evidence.
When a character has been in denial and is finally faced with hard evidence of the truth—a photograph that her husband really is cheating, for example—this can often crack the foundation of denial and let an epiphany shine through.

• Injuring a loved one.
You'd be amazed at the kind of epiphany your protagonist can come to when confronted with the damage he has unintentionally caused others through his actions.

• Danger.
Threat is a powerful agent of change. Faced with either death or bodily harm, characters often face their most basic and unvarnished feelings. Your protagonist might suddenly realize the error of his ways, and wish for a second chance, for example, or be surprised to realize that faced with danger, there is only one person he really hopes to see again before he dies.

However you choose to pressure or stress your protagonist into his epiphany, you must be realistic, and you must utilize dramatic tension. Remember that your protagonist must resist the awareness or change just a little, and the epiphany must come with an emotional, physical, or spiritual cost. The goal of epiphany is to force your character to change.

THE MOMENT OF EPIPHANY

While you may stress and pressure your protagonist for the entire scene if you like, I recommend saving the actual moment of epiphany for near the end of a scene because it's good to leave the reader and the protagonist not too long after this sudden dawning of insight. Most people don't take a sudden, spontaneous action after an epiphany—they let it sink in, and so should you. Pausing will also relieve you of the need to try to explain away any tension or emotional weight that the epiphany brought.

In
The Hours,
the moment of epiphany comes for Laura once she is actually alone in a room with nothing but Virginia Woolf's strong voice, and her own silenced desires finally have space to rise into her thoughts. With time to herself, she is able to realize her epiphany:

It is possible to die. Laura thinks, suddenly, of how she — how anyone-can make a choice like that. It is a reckless, vertiginous thought, slightly disembodied—it announces itself inside her head, faintly but distinctly, like a voice crackling from a distant radio station. She could decide to die. It is an abstract, shimmering notion, not particularly morbid. Hotel rooms are where people do things like that, aren't they? It's possible — perhaps even likely—that someone has ended his or her life right here, in this room, on this bed. Someone said, Enough, no more; someone looked for the last time at these white walls, this smooth white ceiling. By going to a hotel, she sees, you leave the particulars of your own life and enter a neutral zone, a clean white room, where dying does not seem quite so strange.

Laura's epiphany falls into the category of realization of a suppressed desire. She has lived her life in a limited way, and suddenly, this epiphany that she could free herself from her unhappiness through death jars her into a new way of thinking. The epiphany is handled through interior monologue—the reader enters into her thoughts and directly learns what the epiphany is. In many cases, revealing an epiphany through interior monologue is necessary, as it is hard to demonstrate an epiphany through behavior, and even dialogue can be a stretch, because epiphanies are usually quiet, intimate affairs. Laura's epiphany does, in fact, lead to a major change.

In
White Oleander,
Astrid's epiphany is more directly elicited. In her meeting with her mother, Astrid takes a courageous leap and asks something of her mother—challenging her mother's all-powerful hold over her, and begging for some tenderness in the process:

She shook her head, gazed down at her bare tanned feet. "If I could take it all back, I would, Astrid." She lifted her eyes to mine. "You've got to believe me." Her eyes, glinting in the sun, were exactly the color of the pool we swam in together the summer she was arrested. I wanted to swim there again, to submerge myself in them.

"Then tell me you don't want me to testify," I said. "Tell me you don't want me like this. Tell me you would sacrifice the rest of your life to have me back the way I was."

The reader aches for Astrid as she waits to hear what her mother will say, but at the same time, the reader fears Astrid is about to get burned, as the opening of the scene suggested. Her mother does not reply automatically, which already tells Astrid something—and in the time that she waits for her mother to show up for her, Astrid has her epiphany:

And suddenly I felt panic. I'd made a mistake, like when I'd played chess with Ray and I knew a second too late I'd made the wrong move. I had asked a question I couldn't afford to know the answer to. It was the thing I didn't want to know. The rock that never should be turned over. I knew what was under there. I didn't need to see it, the hideous eyeless albino creature that lived underneath.

"Listen, forget it. A deal's a deal. Let's leave it at that."

Astrid realizes in that moment, in a removing-the-blinders style of epiphany, that she has lived in terror of learning that her mother doesn't really love her. Her whole life she has lived with this fear. This kind of epiphany usually comes with a kind of resignation for the character—on some level she has known all along who her mother is, but has willed herself not to see it.

The scene doesn't end there, however. By taking the responsibility out of her mother's hands, by agreeing to the deal, Astrid gets the
result
she wants—her mother tells her that she does not have to testify and that she would do anything to have her daughter "partway back." But this all comes at a cost for Astrid, because it was not offered unconditionally. Also, though Astrid is happy to hear those words, the reader still mistrusts In-grid and isn't sure she means it. By the epiphany's end, Astrid's blinders are fully removed. She sees her mother as she truly is and doesn't have to try to please her anymore.

When you reach it, the moment of epiphany should come with great emotional consequences that either make things better for your protagonist or present him with a difficult emotional choice that he must make. An epiphany can free the protagonist, or it can bind him to a terrible decision. You want to demonstrate the cost of the epiphany—whether through a brief passage of interior monologue or through an action he takes that is clearly derived from the epiphany.

The post-epiphany work of resolving and concluding the events of the epiphany will take place in the next scene or scenes. I encourage you to resist using narrative summary or too much interior monologue to deal with the changes wrought by the epiphany. Character changes are best demonstrated. If your character's epiphany was an identity epiphany, in which he realized that he could not be a doormat any longer, then you will want him to take actions that show him improving upon his self-esteem and confronting people who have treated him carelessly. Epiphanies mark a change of direction and path for your protagonist, and from the point of epiphany on you will want to show how that realization has changed him.

EPIPHANY SCENE MUSE POINTS
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• An epiphany should cause a protagonist to change.

• Open this type of scene with your character anxious about the future or under stress.

• Exert pressure and generally up the ante on your protagonist mid-scene to drive him toward epiphany.

• End your scene just after the epiphany to let the reader and the protagonist digest it.

•The epiphany should cause a change in the protagonist's outlook and direction that will be demonstrated in future scenes.

In fiction, the climax is the high point of all the action and drama in your narrative—where the events that began with the significant situation come to a roiling, intense head. The result of the climax events will have the most dramatic impact on character change and will point you toward the ending (often called the denouement) of your narrative. A climactic scene will be one of the most, if not
the
most, intense, dramatic, powerful scenes in your entire narrative. That is the job of the climax.

You should have only one major climactic scene in your narrative, unless you have multiple narrators who each have their own climax to undergo (though you may want your multiple narrators to undergo the same climactic event, and just choose one person's point of view through which to reveal it). This is because once the climax is over, the job of the rest of your narrative is to resolve, tie up, and conclude what has taken place. Crafting the finale of your novel is akin to picking through the wreckage after a fire and figuring out what's left and how to proceed.

A successful climactic scene must have the following:

• Opposing forces must now collide. Your protagonist and antagonist (whether person, natural disaster or other) must meet and clash.