When plotting out or revising your novel, it’s important to understand the difference between an epiphany and a character arc. Both are useful and important, but they serve very different roles in the narrative. Think of them like salt and sugar: They’re both dry, granular materials, both are very important in cooking, but the two are hardly interchangeable.

This is an epiphany. It’s a moment of revelation, when a character comes to understand something he couldn’t grasp before. I’m not talking about realizations that relate to the plot, as when someone comes to understand the key to a puzzle or finally figures out what missing thing they need in order to overcome some challenge. Those are great story moments, but they don’t have much to do with characterization.

I’m talking about moments when a character suddenly realizes something about himself. Those are moments of deep significance in your book because they foreshadow that the character will begin to think and act differently.

A lot of modern fiction trades in making protagonists into their own worst enemies. This has been true for some time in literary novels, which tend to be deeply driven by characters rather than plot. However, it is becoming increasingly true in mainstream and “plot monster” books too, as writers learn the power of characterization and character growth to more deeply involve the reader in the book.

Regardless of genre, many books have a setup in which a character flaw is the one thing that most prevents the protagonist from getting the job done. Only when he recognizes this—like when an alcoholic finally admits that his drinking is in fact a problem—can he begin to get out of his own way.

This is a character arc. Well, ok, that’s not strictly true. But graduation is a nice representation of a character arc: It’s where a character ends up after a series of epiphanies.

In school, students are faced with many challenges—classes, term papers, and exams—to overcome. They must experience many epiphanies—moments when they finally grasp their course material—in order to overcome these challenges. When they do, they finally succeed—they get an emotionally fulfilling moment of celebration, complete with cap, gown, and diploma.

It’s the same in a novel. Your character starts with some flaws. Throughout the plot, he’ll encounter many challenges, some of which he’ll fail at because of those flaws. After enough failures or after a failure with dire consequences, the he’ll have an epiphany and realize how he must change in order to succeed. After additional challenges, some inevitable setbacks, more epiphanies, and a lot of hard work, the character really does grow as a person. Finally, at the novel’s climax he can then tackle a problem that would surely have defeated him before.

The key difference

An epiphany is nothing more than a realization in the thread of your character’s personal growth. It is a plot point along the inner plot of the character’s personal journey. A character arc, then, is the whole journey.

The journey is not the destination

While graduation is a great metaphor for a character arc, don’t confuse the two. Graduation is not school, it is only the destination of a student’s journey through school. It’s an emotional, symbolic moment. Likewise, a character arc is not an emotional moment, but is the process leading up to a moment when the changes a character has undergone are finally recognized.

For the novelist, this means that while your book should work towards a “graduation moment” for your character, to provide an emotional payoff to the difficult journey of personal growth, you can’t skip the growth itself.

Here’s what doesn’t work: I’ve seen manuscripts from clients where they tried to add a character arc by inserting an epiphany scene into the beginning of the book, and a graduation moment at the end, but without touching anything in between. That’s like character sleeping through the entire four years of college but still receiving a diploma anyway. It falls flat.

To be meaningful, a character arc must affect the plot. It must affect the choices a character makes in the novel’s scenes. To be effective, a character arc must convince readers that the plot would have turned out differently without it because the character would have made different (worse) choices.

You need an epiphany moment to kick things off near the beginning, several smaller epiphany moments along the way as the character’s understanding grows, and the graduation moment at the end. This is why it is so difficult to paste a character arc on top of an existing story structure: Because to make it work, you have to go back and re-consider every choice the character makes in light of what the character learns in the epiphany moments.

Have you ever struggled with a character who just wouldn’t come to life? Who seemed great in your head, but who just laid there like a dead fish once you put him on the page?

Maybe you need to steal his shoes.

It may be that the character has too many advantages. You may, as the saying goes, need to make things worse before the book can get better. I learned this lesson from a fantasy novel I critiqued once, although I believe the principle applies in any genre.

The novel in question was a pretty straightforward fantasy arc: hero has to brave a bunch of dangers in order to save the princess. Nothing wrong with that at all. But the hero was, well, too heroic.

He was terribly strong, with the strength of three ordinary men. He wielded an enormous sword that most men couldn’t even lift. He was an exceptional swordsman, having been trained by the best swordmaster in all the land.

Thus fully prepared, he set off to battle.

Now, don’t get me wrong. There is certainly a place in the world for hack-and-slash fantasy novels, where heroes with rippling muscles lay waste to armies of the enemy, then retire to the local tavern for a tankard of well-earned ale and a wench (not necessarily in that order). Plenty of books like that have sold plenty of copies.

However, the characterization in them is rather thin. And since this blog is all about characterization, let’s fix that.

This setup wasn’t very dramatic because the hero was too well matched to the task. His backstory eliminated any real challenge from his task. No challenge, no drama. The hero was such a bad-ass, right out of the gate, that of course we expect him to succeed. That’s boring. We need to saddle the hero with some misfortunes. We need to take him down a few pegs before we’ll have any interesting drama to work with.

We need, in other words, to steal his shoes. You can go two ways here:

Change the backstory: This is a form of shoe-stealing that takes place before the hero ever gets the shoes to begin with. Rather than having the hero be a muscle-bound, swordmaster jock, make him a skinny weakling. A shoeshine boy or barrel-maker’s apprentice or something. Give him a background that is totally ill-suited to braving dangers and saving princesses. Then, of course, put him in a position where if he doesn’t save the princess, nobody else will.

Oh, let the mighty fall By this I mean go ahead and start with the super-jock, but before he gets to the real adventure, systematically strip him of everything he thinks he needs in order to succeed. Have him break his sword. Give him a case of mono (or, it being fantasy, a curse) that saps his strength and stamina. Let a mugger rob him blind. Steal his actual shoes. Leave him bereft of everything except himself, his own inner drive to succeed, then see whether he still has the heart to brave the dangers and save the princess.

Either way is good. I mean, who do you admire more? A cookie-cutter hero who does something heroic, or a non-hero/fallen-hero facing certain death who plunges in anyway and gets the job done?

I find the latter enormously more interesting: Take away all his advantages, or never give him any to begin with, then we’ll see what he’s really made of in a crisis.

Both strategies inherently bring your character’s inner self to the fore, while heightening the danger and thus the drama. But what both strategies also do for you, as a writer, is that they also steal your crutches.

It’s easy to structure a plot in which the ubermensch hero wins. It’s seductively easy to rely on the character’s great strengths to get out of any jam or solve any problem. Sadly, things that are easy are rarely much good. But when the hero can’t win through brute force, you’ll have to create a plot in which the character uses cleverness and other innate qualities to win the day. I guarantee you, it will be a much more interesting plot to read, with a much more fully developed hero.