Posted: November 7, 2024

Seeing the Light

"Suddenly, everything becomes clear!" Me, attending my second rodeo.

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 I can no longer remember the title or the author's name. I'd give spoiler warnings, but I have no idea if the manuscript ever published.

Yet, this one moment in the story still sticks with me decades later.

The manuscript was a fantasy set in a renaissance-level society, with 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 an incident when a drunken soldier kills a local a disabled, local boy. The soldier's platoon leader refuses to punish him, so the boy's grandmother, a highly trained 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 -- at one point, she sneaks into his room at night and tells him her story, because she recognizes him as an honorable man. It was the platoon leader who violated the law by covering up the soldier's crime. And despite constant pressure, the inspector refuses to back down and declare the murdering soldier insane -- and thus not to blame for what he did -- because that would make him complicit in the coverup. The pressure is real, 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 insane and the grandmother guilty, for the good of everyone. Once again, he is alone, fighting for honor against 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, your readers a 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 [narcissist article] 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 improves 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.

The reason the author was able to pull this off is that 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 accept it in the first place. His character anchored the story while everything else was transformed.

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 [link to Le Carre] 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 said, that can stay with them for decades.