"God," he whispered again, eyes closed, with the child settling onto his hip. "I was born for this!"
This back-and-forth quality—a flashback chapter followed by a present-time chapter—gives the narrative a feeling of suspense and plants more and more seeds in the reader's mind that the protagonist might not be so terrible after all.
If you choose this technique for your narrative, you are essentially running two stories side by side, using the flashbacks to build toward a truth that will have to be addressed, answered, and realized in the frontstory.
Finally, in the example from Gaiman's Anansi Boys, the flashback ends when Charlie's fiancee, Rosie, with whom he was arguing when he first slipped into the memory, calls his attention back to the present:
"So," said Rosie, draining her Chardonnay, "you'll call your Mrs. Higgler and give her my mobile number. Tell her about the wedding and the date. ..."
The flashback achieves two crucial functions. First, it shows the reader what Fat Charlie considers embarrassing and inappropriate behavior. He sees his father as a fair-weather man—Charlie resented the fact that his father could just swoop in at the last minute and make his mother happy. (Some might argue that the flashback shows Charlie as selfish, not caring about his mother's happiness, only caring about himself.) Second, it reveals plot information, as the flashback moves to the day of his mother's funeral, where Charlie spotted a stranger who will play a very significant role in the future plot; but the character is merely dropped there as a hint, a piece of foreshadowing.
Structurally, this sort of flashback acts as a detour from the scene at hand—like a slide of the past slipped into someone's photos of a recent vacation. This is a very good use of the flashback for your consideration—it's brief, it adds to the reader's understanding of the characters, and it provides a hint of future plot events to come.
Flashbacks need to feel purposeful, or they lead to the feeling that you've departed from your story, so they should be used as strategically as possible. They should be vividly written and quickly paced, and should leave the reader with the feeling that he has learned something important that he needs to know.
FLASHBACK SCENE MUSE POINTS_
•A flashback should focus on all of the following: action, information, and character interaction.
•The information contained in the flashback must have some bearing on the frontstory.
•Always be sure to use flashbacks judiciously so the reader doesn't lose track of the frontstory.
• Use flashbacks when the past directly affects the front plot.
• Use flashbacks when you want to use some element of the past to create suspense in the present.
• Use flashbacks to deepen the reader's understanding of a character.
An epiphany is a moment when awareness or a sharp insight dawns suddenly on your protagonist as a result of events and interactions that have driven him to this moment. Epiphany is synonymous with change when it comes to character development. Very often epiphanies come with a cost—characters can be very attached to their perceptions of things and people, and it often hurts when they finally gain awareness. But epiphanies can also bring resurgence in hope or faith that the protagonist believed was lost. By introducing an epiphany, you provide your protagonist with an opportunity to grow, to learn, and to transform.
An epiphany can take place in more than one type of scene—for instance, suspense or drama can build to an epiphany, and an epiphany can also be earned at the end of a contemplative scene. In an epiphany scene:
• The epiphany comes at some kind of cost or it renews hope or faith, or both
• The epiphany rises out of plot events and information—it does not come out of the blue
•Your protagonist gains surprising new insight or breaks through denial
•As a result of the epiphany, the protagonist is forced to make some sort of choice or change
Because epiphanies have a pivotal effect on characters, you don't need to have one in every scene. In fact, one major epiphany in each of your three narrative parts would be plenty. Epiphanies shouldn't happen too early in a narrative either, as they require events and circumstances and emotional information to drive them into being. People don't usually just wake up with insight—it is earned through experience. Very often a dramatic scene (in which hot emotional intensity is elicited), or a suspense scene (in which information has been withheld) comes just before an epiphany scene.
TYPES OF EPIPHANIES
When you write an epiphany scene, you need to take stock of who your character is before the epiphany, what kind of change he needs to undergo, and how you will lead him to this change. Let's look at the kinds of epiphanies a character can undergo.
• Removing the blinders. When a character has been in denial but through an act of will decides to learn what the truth is.
• Realizing a suppressed desire. This is when a character who has lived his life in a limited way realizes what it is he really wants to do or be— the lawyer who realizes he really wants to work with children; the failed artist who realizes he was only acting out his parents' will for him. These are powerful and usually suggest that the character will have to leave one way of life for another.
•Accepting the limitations of oneself or others. Many times a character must realize that the abusive spouse is not going to change; the dead-end job is not going to improve; and that any change he craves will have to be an inside job that nobody else can facilitate.
• Experiencing identity epiphanies. These kinds of epiphanies are fairly specific and limited. This is when a person realizes something essential to his being—that she is a lesbian after all; that he wants to embrace his father's African-American culture rather than his mother's Caucasian
background; that it's time to convert to Judaism. A character's decision to claim an identity of some kind that he had been resisting or denying can come as the result of an epiphany.
•Undergoing a rude awakening. Sometimes a character needs to be forced to change by circumstances or people out of his control. His friends stage an intervention for his drinking; his wife confesses she doesn't really love him.
OPENING AN EPIPHANY SCENE
Now that you have a feeling for the kinds of categories that epiphanies fall into, let's talk about how to open one. What is most important about the opening is that you show the character in conflict of some kind, under pressure, or in some way destabilized. This is the scene in which his old facade is crumbling (or about to), and you want the reader to know that change is on the horizon. Epiphany openings work best when:
• The protagonist is afraid or anxious about the future
• The protagonist is under pressure or stress
• The protagonist takes an unusual action or behaves oddly
• The protagonist expresses conflicted feelings about a given plot event or relationship
•Your setting details or images are symbolic and hint at the kind of epiphany that is to come
Let's take a look at some examples of opening epiphany scenes that show the protagonist unbalanced or en route to an epiphany at the very opening of the scene.
In Michael Cunningham's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel The Hours, Laura Brown is a housewife in 1949 with a "perfect" life—a husband with a good job, a healthy son, and a second child on the way. She has a nice house and all the material things she could possibly want, but her true self is stifled; she wants to be more than a mother and a wife, yet there is no way for her to express this in the life she currently leads.
In the scenes prior to this one, the reader sees Laura repress desire, resentment, and her own creative spark, so there's a feeling that some kind of change is on its way in her life, but they don't yet know what it will be (and neither, it seems, does Laura). Two major factors begin to push Laura toward her epiphany. The first is reading Virginia Woolf's book Mrs. Dalloway, which boldly emphasizes a woman's right to her feelings. The second is the example of her neighbor, Ki
tty, who seems, without any angst, to be able to balance all the demands that Laura cannot. One day after a visit, she and Kitty kiss—and though this kiss happens with no premeditation on Laura's part, it further awakens in her a terrible hunger and desire. Soon after that, she has more trouble dealing with the status quo of her life and finds her son's and husband's demands incredibly oppressive.
The epiphany scene opens with her reality in the process of shifting.
As she pilots her Chevrolet along the Pasadena Freeway, among hills still scorched in places from last year's fire, she feels as if she's dreaming or, more precisely, as if she's remembering this drive from a dream long ago. Everything she sees feels as if it's pinned to the day the way etherized butterflies are pinned to a board.
There are a number of cues that something is different here. The way she feels "as if she's dreaming" and the eerie details of everything feeling "pinned" to the day like "etherized butterflies" are not typical reflections for Laura. The reader feels the tide of change coming. When it is revealed that, in a moment of panic, she left her son with a neighbor and is on her way to rent a motel room, the scene is set for something to happen. Will she kill herself, take a lover, or make some kind of decision about her future and her feelings?
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 Olean
der, 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.
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