ULTRA-HARRIER TONY’S CHAIN LETTER · TO THE
SWARTHMORONS
Epiphanies are everythingPlace characters in exotic settings
Chapter 19
What you can do is have epiphanies,
2Epiphanies are everything to the artistic writer,
3nAn epiphany being the momentary illusion of meaning where there isn’t any,
4Which is both oironic and literary,
5And pproves that you are an artist.
6Fortunately, it is very easy to make up epiphanies,
7Because they never involve any real action of any kind,
8But kind of lurk within prosaic moments,
9Like when your spouse sighs over a cup of decaffeinated tea,
10With sunlight streaming in through the window of your New England cottage,
11And you’ve just finished reading the latest issue of the ‘Pseudo-Intellectual Review,’
12And can’t quite remember qwhat you were going to do next.
13To turn this into an epiphany, all you have to do is this:
14Repeat one of these images in slightly different or ramplified terms, as if it had just acquired some new significance;
15Insert a totally sextraneous recollection that is every bit as prosaic as the scene you’ve already described, as if it had been suggested to you by something in the cottage scene;
16And then describe some additional prosaic moment in the cottage, with lots and lots of superfluous tdetails, leaving the reader to figure out for herself what it all means.
17When the epiphany has been completed in this fashion, you just skip twice the number of lines you normally use between paragraphs,
18aAnd change the subject.
19This is so important that it is, all by itself, practically the only thing you actually need to know about artistic writing,
20And it is so simple that you don’t ever have to agonize over it at all.
21Indeed, if you like, you can write complete novels using nothing but this bsimple technique.
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