How to Write an Epiphany: Smack Dab in the Imagination by Dia Calhoun

For me, the question isn't how to communicate your character's actual epiphany—some sudden insight wisdom, or revelation. The statement of that can be straightforward enough. No, the haunting question is how does a writer communicate the experience—the state of mind, psyche, emotion, somatic feeling—that leads to the character’s epiphany? That's what makes the epiphany believable. This is tricky because that experience is often fundamentally a liminal state of psychic disorientation, and you don’t want to disorient the reader or have your writing feel over the top. So how do you do it?

Structure.

That seems counter-intuitive, right? To structure an experience that falls somewhere between an ah-ha moment at the low end or a profound revelation at the high end. But if you look at initiation experiences, which are similarly about disorientation that leads to revelation, you’ll see they are all about structure.

 Here are a few suggestions gleaned from my study of the problem.

--Start in the character's very ordinary, very grounded kitchen-table-world.

--Have something or someone, be a bridge into the liminal world.

--Have the character feel several contradictory physical sensations—the old hot and cold idea. Or up is down or down is up. This starts to dissolve the ordinary world. The character is in a chaotic spin. Build this moment.

--State the epiphany.

--Return to the ordinary world and integrate the experience.

Practice this technique by writing up scenarios. I'm telling you; this really works. Have fun.