Literary Fiction's Quiet Epiphanies: Internal Change as Plot
In genre fiction, plot is external: solve the murder, defeat the villain, fall in love, escape the threat. In literary fiction, plot is often internal: realize you’ve been lying to yourself, understand your mother’s choices, recognize you can’t go home again, see beauty in what you once took for granted. Nothing explodes. Nobody dies (usually). No crimes are solved. But everything changes. This is the art of the quiet epiphany—the moment when internal transformation becomes story. ...