No. 6: Ohhhhhhhhhh.

The Importance of A-ha! Moments in Writing & Life

Until I was about 28 years old, I thought I knew everything.

I think this was a combination of factors — a) being a middle child, where any doubt or weakness would be exploited by  siblings, b) being a kid of immigrants, where parents expected you to know everything from birth (and anything you didn’t know could be solved with flashcard drills), and c) an enduring love of Madonna, who acted like she did, in fact, know everything, so why shouldn’t I know it all too?

My early writing career as a screenwriter did nothing to shake up my notions that art was a product of conscious will and any spiritual notions associated with creativity were lazy replacements for hard work. Screenwriting is so appealing because it rewards this kind of hard-headed persistence. It’s rigid. structured. controllable. Day after day, it satiated my oversized left brain and gave me the illusion that I was the master of every twist and turn. Closest I can compare it to is cooking with a firm, solid recipe. Yes, you can add too much paprika or undercook the meat or over-whisk until its soggy, but there’s guardrails that ensure a casserole will be a casserole. A quiche will be a quiche.

It was only when I moved to novels that I learned a casserole might be a cantaloupe.

Novels taught me I knew nothing.

Nothing about writing. Nothing about life.

The first revelation came while writing Chapter 8 of The School for Good and Evil. Until then, the book had progressed relatively smoothly according to a detailed outline I’d drawn up to sell the series. Chapter 8 was supposed to be an Animal Communication class, whereby a group of students had a humorous encounter with a horse.

It was June 2011. I’d fallen in love with some wispy-haired boy in Round Rock, Texas as a result of my perpetual attempts to find a mate outside of New York City — “a getaway car,” as Taylor would later call it, to escape the Manhattan jungle, which I knew was toxic for me, despite a decade living there. Me and the Boy had been Facetiming and talking every day, and I’d finally made the decision to go visit him. As I drove from  the Austin airport, I remember assessing the real estate options and keeping an eye out for tennis courts or any good sushi joints, all the things I’d need to make this place home. I pulled in to the coffee shop where we were supposed to meet, fixed my hair in the car mirror and chewed on a few Tic-Tacs, memorizing every detail of the moment, because this would be the story of how I met my guy, the guy, and swaggered in, ready for my Texas Swoon. And then…

Nothing.

Literally no chemistry to speak of. All those Facetimes, all that talking, all that fantasy… and in person, it was a popped balloon. The opposite of energy or attraction. The opposite of fate. A fitting end to a left-brained love story, with no room for life.

Problem was I now had 2 days of romantic activities planned in Round Rock and no one to do these things with, so instead, I did thing I always do when life disappoints me, which is write.

Sequestered at the Motel 6 in Round Rock, I started Chapter 8 at 1:30pm on a Friday afternoon. The Evers were supposed to be learning Animal Communication with that team of friendly horses, and yet no damn horses would show up. Hours passed. It was getting dark. I forced equine words, paragraphs, pages, then would delete them all.

A fury built inside me — fury that I’d wasted money on this trip, that I had bad taste in men, that this chapter wasn’t working, that I was in the Texas desert in the pits of June…

And suddenly I had the first, real a-ha moment of my life.

That this chapter wasn’t going to be about horses.

That it would be about something else.

Something my outline didn’t know and I didn’t know and I wouldn’t know until it was on the page.

That’s when new words started coming — big, vibrant, horrific scenes about Wish Fish that probe your deepest desires and find the true loves you’re supposed to be with and the things you really want that you’re too blind to see and all the big, scary secrets you keep from yourself, even if that means these Wish Fish have to swallow you whole and take you to the belly of the universe.

You, meaning me.

Art by Michael Blank

I needed the Wish Fish. More than I needed horses.

I stopped for a couple meals and to sleep, but otherwise I was parked on that dingy bed, laptop propped up on pillows, lost in a fever dream for almost 48 hours. I consider it my first psychedelic trip, but generated entirely from within, where I accessed a dimension beyond myself and discovered that the best stuff, the truly great stuff inside me, would never come from me at all.

Gone went the outline.

I’ve never used one since.

All of us artists have these inklings — where we realize we’ve got life all wrong — but it took me time to learn how to recognize them. Oprah calls it the ‘a-ha!’ moment, but that suggests victory and triumph. Only that’s not how these moments feel. It’s more like an “ohhhhhhh,” a sucker-punch of awareness, where you realize you’ve had your head up your ass and that you’ve been missing the thing all along.

These moments are so valuable that I’ve now built in processes into my writing — and my life — to force them to the surface. For instance, with this new novel, every time I write a chapter, I’ll take a day after to ask myself the question again and again: What if I have it all wrong? In other words, I give myself permission to fail. Instead of forcing conviction and that know-it-all intensity that used to be my weapon against the world, now I tell myself I know nothing, and everything in the chapter is up for negotiation.

Chapter 5, for instance, was meant to set up the high-stakes “grail” of the plot. I worked on the chapter for months and months until it was a clean-whistling machine. Upon this chapter, the whole book hinged. And yet something always seemed wrong with it, no matter how much I edited. A baby pointing to dodgy bathwater.

Then finally, I gave myself permission to be wrong. Dead wrong. And I did this by selecting-all on the text… and deleting it.

5000 words. Erased.

Panic reared like a dragon. But somewhere deeper, I felt the little elves inside me do a dance. And then I understood: ohhhhhhh.

I don’t need that chapter at all.

The Old Me would have revolted. It would have beat and cudgeled that chapter into submission and forced it into the book. How else to show the world I’d spent months on it? Months that seemed completely wasted now? How else to show how hard I’d worked?

But truth is, no one cares. All anyone cares about is the book, not the process. Even if for me, the process is the thing. And process means chasing rabbits down holes until I find the one that makes me go “ohhhhhh.”

Ironically, the whole experience of Chapter 5 has led to a new tool in my kit. Whenever I’m done with a chapter in this book, the next day, I highlight all the text and… delete it. Just to see how I feel. Anxious? Angry? Relieved?

The feelings are just as much a puzzle piece as the words.

So tell me, since this diary goes two ways. What’s the most revelatory moment you’ve had in your own life’s work, whether it’s writing or otherwise? Have you ever had a moment where you’ve realized you’ve gotten it all wrong?

Until next week.