Writing for Epiphany
The process of leaning into stories as you write them has surprising resonances with a life of prayer—and both offer startling openings into grace.
By Christopher Hazell
When I teach creative writing to undergraduates, I begin by developing with them a shared vocabulary for talking about narrative art. I introduce them to various basic techniques: interiority and dialogue; point-of-view (first, second, close-third, omniscient, etc.), plot and tension, setting and atmosphere, characterization, and so on. I imagine some students find learning these terms and techniques burdensome. I get it: Many students take a creative writing course precisely because they want to escape the litany of rhetorical rules expected in standard English courses. Creative writing, they presume, will allow them to soar unbridled on the fuel of creative intuition. No rules—just pure and unadulterated inspiration!
This is partly true, of course. As the writer John Gardener points out in The Art of Fiction, the artist sometimes writes in a “thoughtless white heat of ‘inspiration,’ drawing on his unconscious, trusting his instincts, hoping that when he looks back at it later, in cool objectivity, the scene will work.” Still, the best writing balances these passionate flights of fancy with an editor’s sharp and rigorous eye, and as the semester continues and we begin workshopping stories, students start to realize this. It becomes clear that some stories seem to “work” better than others, and we can trace these reasons, usually, to the presence or absence of certain techniques. A clearly sketched character is important. Adequate action and dialogue propelling the story forward keeps it from feeling flat. Very few writers are able to disregard such techniques and still write good fiction. Flannery O’Connor perhaps captured it best in her revelatory Mystery and Manners: “You can do anything you can get away with, but nobody has ever gotten away with much.”
So, over the course of the semester those students who were perhaps resistant to these so-called techniques of fiction start to accept their necessity. But they also begin to think much more deeply about characters in space and time. For instance, a student might begin writing a story about an alcoholic struggling to connect with his daughter, a middle-aged woman contemplating an affair, or an autistic teenager struggling through his first day of high school. At first, these characters are mere caricatures: a composite of stereotypical traits that we tend to associate with the alcoholic father or autistic teenager. However, as they discuss these characters and continue writing and rewriting them, the characters eventually turn into unique and distinct figures. In other words, as students think deeper about their stories over time—as they practice sustained and intense reflection on their own work—their characters become more and more human and particular.
Naturally, the same is true in my own writing. As I wade through each draft, wrestling with my characters and thinking through their various interactions and dilemmas, something well-rounded and concrete eventually emerges. The more I try to understand and imagine a given character in a specific situation and what their conflicting desires are (because good characters, like real people, don’t always know what their desires are and often have several in conflict—we can look to Saint Augustine or Saint Paul here), the more I learn about what it means to be human. I learn something meaningful, and often something that surprises me. Again, though, such realizations only come by way of intense and regular concentration: a type of refined and patient apprehension.
When we’re willing to sit with characters or stories and contemplate them deeply, we can encounter epiphanies that deepen our understanding of what it means to be human.
This type of apprehension isn’t exclusive to writing fiction; it belongs to any serious engagement with narrative art—film, stage productions, story-based documentaries, and so on. When we’re willing to sit with characters or stories and contemplate them deeply, we can encounter epiphanies that deepen our understanding of what it means to be human. James Joyce is famous for coining the literary epiphany, which he defined in his work Stephen Hero as “a sudden spiritual manifestation, whether in the vulgarity of speech or of gesture or in a memorable phase of the mind itself.” Often, when these take place in fiction, they entail heightened moments of self-awareness: an unfaithful husband realizes his actions have irrevocably destroyed a marriage or a young parvenu comes to understand the depth of her mother’s abuse at the hands of her father. Of course, there are what we might call “good” or “joyful” epiphanies, too. One beautiful example can be found in Marilynn Robinson’s Gilead, where the main character, a Christian pastor named John Ames, writes about a simple but blessed encounter he has one afternoon:
There was a young couple strolling along half a block ahead of me. The sun had come up brilliantly after a heavy rain, and the trees were glistening and very wet. On some impulse, plain exuberance, I suppose, the fellow jumped up and caught hold of a branch, and a storm of luminous water came pouring down on the two of them, and they laughed and took off running, the girl sweeping water off her hair and her dress as if she were a little bit disgusted, but she wasn’t. It was a beautiful thing to see, like something from a myth. I don’t know why I thought of that now, except perhaps because it is easy to believe in such moments that water was made primarily for blessing, and only secondarily for growing vegetables or doing the wash.
Similarly to Robinson, though by very different means, Flannery O’Connor also wrote stories that dramatized instances of epiphany, which she referred to as grace. Her stories depicted characters gaining some deeper level of self-awareness—often through violence and suffering—and being given an opportunity to choose grace or its opposite. As she writes, “It is the free act, the acceptance of grace particularly, that I always have my eye on as the thing which will make the story work.” This is precisely where I think we can borrow something from the creation or study of stories that can help deepen our relationship with God through prayer. In other words, by reflecting on the story of our own lives with the very same level of intensity and frequency, we can begin to discover epiphanies of grace.
In real life we may not have particularly heightened or dramatic realizations most of the time, but I think something similar happens in prayer when we bring this same level of attention and concentration to it that we can a short story or film. Simone Weil thought this as well, I would venture, writing in Gravity and Grace, “Attention, taken to its highest degree, is the same thing as prayer. It presupposes faith and love.” What is our life but another story, one in which we are the main characters living and acting within the cosmic novel of God’s providential care? And what moments of grace, crafted perfectly by our divine author, are present in such a story—if we’re only willing to look hard enough? Yet, like with any complex story, if we don’t take the time with it to reflect on it deeply and frequently, we will miss the rich subtext swirling with metaphors, symbols, meaning, and, yes, even epiphanies.
When I sit trying to make sense of my life through the eyes of God, or attempting to discern how God is inviting me to act in my concrete situation, I’m opening myself up to encountering God as well as who I am in His eyes—a beloved son with eternal dignity and an unrepeatable role to play in His plan of salvation. And the same is true for each of us. We do such critical reading literally when we practice Lectio Divina, reflecting on the ultimate and greatest story—the story of God made flesh—to understand God’s nature and our relationship to Him. This ancient Catholic practice invites us to immerse ourselves within Scripture by engaging our imagination. By reflecting deeply on a given Biblical scene and imagining ourselves there—conjuring the smell of the Sea of Galilee, the sounds of the crowds in awe of Jesus’ words, etc.—we relive the story and experience new insights and revelations. It’s by seeing ourselves as part of a larger story, one that is being authored by God, that we come to understand our role in God’s divine plan of creation and redemption.
I can recall moments in my own life when I realized I had been deluding myself about something, or that I had actually been acting selfishly and hurting someone, or that I had made a mistake. Some of these moments of epiphany emerged from sustained and focused prayer: from “workshopping” the story of my life with the Holy Spirit as my guide, so to speak. Sure, sometimes such realizations come in dramatic instances—the types of epiphanic moments we might see in a story or film—but often they come in the quiet of reflective prayer.
This brings me back to what I see as one important reason (there are many others, of course) to write or engage with stories: by honing our ability to engage deeply with stories, we also develop a greater capacity, through grace, to understand the role we play in the wonderfully exciting story of God’s providence. We come to experience epiphanies of God’s presence in our lives. And by reading and writing stories, we learn to see our own lives and others’ in dramatically meaningful terms. Ultimately, we allow God to make the story of our lives more beautiful than any saga we could ever craft on our own.
Christopher Hazell is a writer and editor. He is pursuing a PhD in English and Creative Writing at the University of North Texas, where he is also a teaching fellow. He is the author of Ends in Mind, a newsletter about culture, technology, Christian spirituality, the arts, and more.
