Yes, this, everyday I show up and sometimes I figure it out and sometimes no matter how quietly I sit, I don't see the way through, and on those days, when I'm done, I go for a walk and then it hits me.
I'm glad you reposted this, Josh, as I had wanted to read it more carefully when it first appeared and didn't get back to it. Two things are true at once, for me: I don't believe in epiphanies as you describe them, and, at the same time, more and more, I have them all day long. The essence of the experience might be captured in the "looking away" because what's happening for me is that I am centering and allowing the insights to happen. Allowing is key. I am not making things happen, nor are things strictly speaking happening to me. It's more of a collaboration with presence. Quakers call this the process of discernment, which I am now inspired to write about on my soon-to-launch newsletter, Convinced (about my experiences of a member of the Religious Society of Friends).
Epiphanies feel like "aha" moments, but they also feel like the result of a process (often a very long one) that's simply hidden from my conscious mind. Call that God if you like, but I suspect God was simply waiting for me to get out of my own way. I'm working-working-working on a solution, but it is happening in the parts of my mind that I don't have control over (and it doesn't feel like work). The more I trust this process and the less I resist by trying to make something happen, the more easily an "epiphany" arises. Lately, I have been experimenting with just letting this discernment process happen all day long, when the stakes are much lower. Other religious practices call this continuous revelation. Then, somehow, it feels just as much an epiphany to realize what I want for lunch as it does to discern the solution to a short story whose ending has been eluding me.
In short, I, too, love the "aha" moments, especially when they feel like sudden bursts of insight. I think of the complex architecture of a short story, the elements I hope to include, the feelings I want my reader to experience, etc. There's so much I want to weave into a piece (and so much to cut, once I do!) But--with writing, as with the rest of life--I also believe that it was really only my resistance to all that the present moment has to offer that made the wait so long in the first place.
I so appreciate these thoughts, Carol. The contradiction that you live with is fascinating. I guess I'm not convinced it is actually two opposing truths. What about my description doesn't ring true? Everything you say about looking away, letting go, allowing the breakthrough to complete itself is true of Cather's Thea Kronborg in the Arizona desert. She fought so hard, really gave herself completely to the piano in Chicago -- and couldn't will herself to a breakthrough. Somehow the epiphany in Panther Canyon transformed her in ways that she could then parlay into more focused and ultimately successful effort.
"Continuous revelation" is a potentially rich term that I suppose I don't quite understand, either. But I hear you saying that it has something to do with being fully present, not projecting too much into the future, allowing insight to reveal itself. As Frank was saying, I think, there is absolutely a relationship between discipline and creative awakening. How do you, as a writer, consciously practice your craft in that more receptive, less controlling way?
You're reminding me of a book by Lisa Cron, "Story Genius," that I originally thought was quite tantalizing, because it promised to apply neuroscience to the creative process. Cron believes one must write the ending first, and then reverse engineer the whole narrative to build toward it. She even offers a template for each scene, scaffolding higher-order goals and lower-order goals, and trying to map the external plot elements onto an inner conflict, which she says is what we really evolved to expect from a story. I can't imagine writing anything with that level of control. Generally I have a sense of where to begin, a big turning point that I'm writing toward, perhaps with some "tent pole" scenes along the way. But I cannot write an ending until I've allowed the story to reveal itself along the way. Stephen King similarly sees this as a process of excavation rather than creation -- the story exists fully-formed, like a fossil, and we remove the obstructions surrounding it as we discover its contours. But perhaps I'm far afield of your point now?
Oh, dear, yes, Lisa Cron. I've used her "Wired for Story" in my writing classes, and it does help writers with a basic sense of the demands of narrative. But to describe a story as a construction conforming to expectations rooted in biology (and thus to build it using the sort of "save-the-cat" outline so popular nowadays) is to naturalize and obscure story's Western origins. I'm not attacking those origins, only noting that the stories arising from them have cultural stakes, even if their authors don't acknowledge them. I think many writers do use Cron's method, and I can see the appeal of King's "excavation" metaphor. More power to them. (Writing is hard enough--do whatever works!) But, yes, I'm much more in the Thea Kronberg camp of writing as acquiescence, if you will. That passage of Cather's is so lovely!
Your description *does* ring true: the achievement of epiphany is the practice of allowing--I think you are trying to say that with the Cather passage. Where, I think, we differ is in the question of divine relationship, which very likely has less relevance to you or to your sense of yourself as a writer. If it's true (and, who knows?) that epiphany is what happens when you finally relax your resistance, whether that happens once or twice in a lifetime or throughout the course of a day, then what you are resisting merits a closer look. For me, that is always my right relationship with the divine (source, creation, God, etc.). This is to say, I am not resisting the right ending to the story. I am not resisting the solution to any problem or the answer to any question as such; I am resisting the relationship that would make me more fully available to all of those gifts being bestowed upon me, and more. I believe this relationship can be disciplined; in good periods, which are too infrequent, I've gotten a fraction better at it. Ultimately the discipline is about my relationship to that source not to the objective per se.
Therefore, continuous revelation is first and foremost about collaboration (which requires presence, availability, showing up regularly, not looking away) more than adherence to form (Cron) or even systematic discovery (King). Neither of these authors approaches the generative process in a way that speaks to me. If I understand your own description of process, you and I have much more similar methods than either of us has with King and Cron.
To explain all of this (because you asked) makes it sound like the distinctions I'm drawing matter. I'm not at all sure they do. To some, I'll sound pious. But it's just devotion (bird-watching can be holy, right?) which I think is meant to be commonplace--both life-giving and ordinary.
"To describe a story as a construction conforming to expectations rooted in biology (and thus to build it using the sort of "save-the-cat" outline so popular nowadays) is to naturalize and obscure story's Western origins." That's an essay waiting to be written :).
I actually find King's fossil idea useful, because I don't see him saying at all that one can systematically discover anything. In fact, he says the opposite -- that it's the material that's in control, not the writer. He's saying that we're all writing blindly forward, and then we get a sense of something whole that it's not up to us to create so much as bring to light in its wholeness. This is very much what Thea Kronborg is doing in Panther Canyon -- waiting for a visitation that it's not in her power to complete.
This is also so smart: "If it's true (and, who knows?) that epiphany is what happens when you finally relax your resistance, whether that happens once or twice in a lifetime or throughout the course of a day, then what you are resisting merits a closer look." This is the great mystery of creativity. I feel enough wonder in natural things that have evolved to be what they are that I don't need there to be anything divine behind my cognitive breakthroughs. Consciousness is so vast -- the potential for synaptic connections so huge, and the rhizomatic connections to the world so infinite -- that I believe it is explanation enough. But I think that my default tropes are all spiritual, even if I don't believe in the divine, and my approach to writing is so similar to religious practice that you're quite right that the distinctions don't matter much. In fact, I might well learn something from your idea of lowering my resistance and yielding to the whatever-it-is. I certainly know that when I am feeling miserable or unsafe in my life, I am not able to create. I can write polemics out of that space, I can do dogged reporting. But I cannot possibly write a literary memoir or begin a new novel if I don't have enough of a foundation to lower my guard.
Here's a thought: this comment exchange already has the feel of a dialogue. We ought to pass it back and forth in email and then share the result as a proper post?
That’s the approach I take when looking for morels. It’s like I can’t recognize the pattern looking straight on, or as though I have to catch them unawares.
Working in the hard sciences, I don’t recall many epiphanies occurring around me, and if I had any myself, I’ve long since forgotten them. Success there was usually predicated on sheer doggedness — that is, there were no shortcuts.
I usually associate this type of sudden creation with the arts, particularly music. Paul McCartney described waking up with the tune of “Yesterday” in his head, thinking he must have heard it somewhere. And Bob Dylan has spoken in religious language about moments that changed his life, for example, hearing Lead Belly’s “Cotton Fields” for the first time at age 18: “It was like somebody laid hands on me.”
It would seem to me it’s fairly obvious that epiphanies only occur when the ground has been prepared. Both McCartney and Dylan were immersed in musical creation. A musical solution won’t occur to the non-musician or to someone who only listens to music. A writing solution depends on a lot of previous writing; it may occur while you’re doing something else, but probably not if you haven’t been writing much lately.
The point can't be found straight on (as the poet goes on to say.) I'm a great believe in the askance, the oblique. So much information there, which sometimes I think is only mysterious to us because we are so unused to looking or responding in any way but straight on.
I happened to come across this video where Taylor Swift describes songwriting epiphany vs. craft, and the feeling when inspiration comes that it can feel too easy (the link should skip to the 6:15 mark):
Not "far inferior" at all, the scene filled to the brim with activity and sensation available only through indirection. Michelle Baliff would call this the “ekstatic”—from the Greek meaning out of place or standing outside oneself, unconscious territory inscribed with what bespeaks us from the shadows.
Fantastic discourse here, Frank. I love the morel example. Quite right -- those little devils like to hide in plain sight.
I'm surprised that epiphany isn't part of your experience in science. Not even in thinking about how to set up an experiment or frame a research question? I would imagine that your closing point would apply there, too -- that immersion in science would be a prerequisite for breakthroughs. I mean, you have to get your research ideas from somewhere, even if the investigation of those questions or hypotheses is more dogged...
But you're quite right that there is a long prelude to creative awakening. And in that way, there aren't really any shortcuts to it, either.
In fact, Kounios and Beeman lay out the following stages of creative insight:
Immersion in the problem --> reaching an impasse --> diversion. These three cycle recursively until the leap from the impasse to insight happens (either piecemeal or suddenly). And underlying this conscious process is an unconscious stretch of incubation. There are affinities between this model and Graham Wallas's 1926 model, where Wallas identifies four stages: preparation --> incubation --> illumination --> verification. But Wallas thought that most of this happened consciously. There is also a Geneplore model that I've omitted since the point of this essay was to avoid too much academic jargon. I think the breakthrough for Kounios and Beeman is showing that you can't crack a cognitive impasse by grinding away at it. Diversion allows the unconscious incubation to break through.
I was probably thinking more along the lines of Edison’s 99% perspiration model and his brute forcing his way to a lightbulb filament solution. Or maybe of Franklin, heading back from England to join the Revolution, measuring sea water temperature to establish the boundaries of what we now call the Gulf Stream (not sure which is more remarkable: that a man of nearly 70 years is still ceaselessly collecting data, or that he’s thrown in with a bunch of 30-something revolutionaries).
Ah, I see your point about Edison. Kounios and Beeman would call that just "insight," as opposed to "sudden insight" or "creative insight." Franklin was/is indeed a marvel. He was also a pioneer of sorts in short fiction, writing some delicious satires. "The Speech of Polly Baker" is magnificent.
Yes, this, everyday I show up and sometimes I figure it out and sometimes no matter how quietly I sit, I don't see the way through, and on those days, when I'm done, I go for a walk and then it hits me.
Beautifully explained!
I'm glad you reposted this, Josh, as I had wanted to read it more carefully when it first appeared and didn't get back to it. Two things are true at once, for me: I don't believe in epiphanies as you describe them, and, at the same time, more and more, I have them all day long. The essence of the experience might be captured in the "looking away" because what's happening for me is that I am centering and allowing the insights to happen. Allowing is key. I am not making things happen, nor are things strictly speaking happening to me. It's more of a collaboration with presence. Quakers call this the process of discernment, which I am now inspired to write about on my soon-to-launch newsletter, Convinced (about my experiences of a member of the Religious Society of Friends).
Epiphanies feel like "aha" moments, but they also feel like the result of a process (often a very long one) that's simply hidden from my conscious mind. Call that God if you like, but I suspect God was simply waiting for me to get out of my own way. I'm working-working-working on a solution, but it is happening in the parts of my mind that I don't have control over (and it doesn't feel like work). The more I trust this process and the less I resist by trying to make something happen, the more easily an "epiphany" arises. Lately, I have been experimenting with just letting this discernment process happen all day long, when the stakes are much lower. Other religious practices call this continuous revelation. Then, somehow, it feels just as much an epiphany to realize what I want for lunch as it does to discern the solution to a short story whose ending has been eluding me.
In short, I, too, love the "aha" moments, especially when they feel like sudden bursts of insight. I think of the complex architecture of a short story, the elements I hope to include, the feelings I want my reader to experience, etc. There's so much I want to weave into a piece (and so much to cut, once I do!) But--with writing, as with the rest of life--I also believe that it was really only my resistance to all that the present moment has to offer that made the wait so long in the first place.
Lovely reply, Carol, full of insight.
I so appreciate these thoughts, Carol. The contradiction that you live with is fascinating. I guess I'm not convinced it is actually two opposing truths. What about my description doesn't ring true? Everything you say about looking away, letting go, allowing the breakthrough to complete itself is true of Cather's Thea Kronborg in the Arizona desert. She fought so hard, really gave herself completely to the piano in Chicago -- and couldn't will herself to a breakthrough. Somehow the epiphany in Panther Canyon transformed her in ways that she could then parlay into more focused and ultimately successful effort.
"Continuous revelation" is a potentially rich term that I suppose I don't quite understand, either. But I hear you saying that it has something to do with being fully present, not projecting too much into the future, allowing insight to reveal itself. As Frank was saying, I think, there is absolutely a relationship between discipline and creative awakening. How do you, as a writer, consciously practice your craft in that more receptive, less controlling way?
You're reminding me of a book by Lisa Cron, "Story Genius," that I originally thought was quite tantalizing, because it promised to apply neuroscience to the creative process. Cron believes one must write the ending first, and then reverse engineer the whole narrative to build toward it. She even offers a template for each scene, scaffolding higher-order goals and lower-order goals, and trying to map the external plot elements onto an inner conflict, which she says is what we really evolved to expect from a story. I can't imagine writing anything with that level of control. Generally I have a sense of where to begin, a big turning point that I'm writing toward, perhaps with some "tent pole" scenes along the way. But I cannot write an ending until I've allowed the story to reveal itself along the way. Stephen King similarly sees this as a process of excavation rather than creation -- the story exists fully-formed, like a fossil, and we remove the obstructions surrounding it as we discover its contours. But perhaps I'm far afield of your point now?
Oh, dear, yes, Lisa Cron. I've used her "Wired for Story" in my writing classes, and it does help writers with a basic sense of the demands of narrative. But to describe a story as a construction conforming to expectations rooted in biology (and thus to build it using the sort of "save-the-cat" outline so popular nowadays) is to naturalize and obscure story's Western origins. I'm not attacking those origins, only noting that the stories arising from them have cultural stakes, even if their authors don't acknowledge them. I think many writers do use Cron's method, and I can see the appeal of King's "excavation" metaphor. More power to them. (Writing is hard enough--do whatever works!) But, yes, I'm much more in the Thea Kronberg camp of writing as acquiescence, if you will. That passage of Cather's is so lovely!
Your description *does* ring true: the achievement of epiphany is the practice of allowing--I think you are trying to say that with the Cather passage. Where, I think, we differ is in the question of divine relationship, which very likely has less relevance to you or to your sense of yourself as a writer. If it's true (and, who knows?) that epiphany is what happens when you finally relax your resistance, whether that happens once or twice in a lifetime or throughout the course of a day, then what you are resisting merits a closer look. For me, that is always my right relationship with the divine (source, creation, God, etc.). This is to say, I am not resisting the right ending to the story. I am not resisting the solution to any problem or the answer to any question as such; I am resisting the relationship that would make me more fully available to all of those gifts being bestowed upon me, and more. I believe this relationship can be disciplined; in good periods, which are too infrequent, I've gotten a fraction better at it. Ultimately the discipline is about my relationship to that source not to the objective per se.
Therefore, continuous revelation is first and foremost about collaboration (which requires presence, availability, showing up regularly, not looking away) more than adherence to form (Cron) or even systematic discovery (King). Neither of these authors approaches the generative process in a way that speaks to me. If I understand your own description of process, you and I have much more similar methods than either of us has with King and Cron.
To explain all of this (because you asked) makes it sound like the distinctions I'm drawing matter. I'm not at all sure they do. To some, I'll sound pious. But it's just devotion (bird-watching can be holy, right?) which I think is meant to be commonplace--both life-giving and ordinary.
"To describe a story as a construction conforming to expectations rooted in biology (and thus to build it using the sort of "save-the-cat" outline so popular nowadays) is to naturalize and obscure story's Western origins." That's an essay waiting to be written :).
I actually find King's fossil idea useful, because I don't see him saying at all that one can systematically discover anything. In fact, he says the opposite -- that it's the material that's in control, not the writer. He's saying that we're all writing blindly forward, and then we get a sense of something whole that it's not up to us to create so much as bring to light in its wholeness. This is very much what Thea Kronborg is doing in Panther Canyon -- waiting for a visitation that it's not in her power to complete.
This is also so smart: "If it's true (and, who knows?) that epiphany is what happens when you finally relax your resistance, whether that happens once or twice in a lifetime or throughout the course of a day, then what you are resisting merits a closer look." This is the great mystery of creativity. I feel enough wonder in natural things that have evolved to be what they are that I don't need there to be anything divine behind my cognitive breakthroughs. Consciousness is so vast -- the potential for synaptic connections so huge, and the rhizomatic connections to the world so infinite -- that I believe it is explanation enough. But I think that my default tropes are all spiritual, even if I don't believe in the divine, and my approach to writing is so similar to religious practice that you're quite right that the distinctions don't matter much. In fact, I might well learn something from your idea of lowering my resistance and yielding to the whatever-it-is. I certainly know that when I am feeling miserable or unsafe in my life, I am not able to create. I can write polemics out of that space, I can do dogged reporting. But I cannot possibly write a literary memoir or begin a new novel if I don't have enough of a foundation to lower my guard.
Here's a thought: this comment exchange already has the feel of a dialogue. We ought to pass it back and forth in email and then share the result as a proper post?
Thanks, Josh. I truly value my exchanges with you! As for sharing the dialogue, I'm game if you are!
Jared Carter has a poem that captures the “looking away” approach to inspiration you describe:
https://poets.org/poem/after-rain
That’s the approach I take when looking for morels. It’s like I can’t recognize the pattern looking straight on, or as though I have to catch them unawares.
Working in the hard sciences, I don’t recall many epiphanies occurring around me, and if I had any myself, I’ve long since forgotten them. Success there was usually predicated on sheer doggedness — that is, there were no shortcuts.
I usually associate this type of sudden creation with the arts, particularly music. Paul McCartney described waking up with the tune of “Yesterday” in his head, thinking he must have heard it somewhere. And Bob Dylan has spoken in religious language about moments that changed his life, for example, hearing Lead Belly’s “Cotton Fields” for the first time at age 18: “It was like somebody laid hands on me.”
It would seem to me it’s fairly obvious that epiphanies only occur when the ground has been prepared. Both McCartney and Dylan were immersed in musical creation. A musical solution won’t occur to the non-musician or to someone who only listens to music. A writing solution depends on a lot of previous writing; it may occur while you’re doing something else, but probably not if you haven’t been writing much lately.
Thank you for sharing the Carter poem:
"Conviction’s liable to say straight off
this one’s a leaf, or that one’s merely clay,
and miss the point:"
The point can't be found straight on (as the poet goes on to say.) I'm a great believe in the askance, the oblique. So much information there, which sometimes I think is only mysterious to us because we are so unused to looking or responding in any way but straight on.
I happened to come across this video where Taylor Swift describes songwriting epiphany vs. craft, and the feeling when inspiration comes that it can feel too easy (the link should skip to the 6:15 mark):
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FvVnP8G6ITs&t=375s
Yes -- and here is a far inferior poem of my own on the subject.
Indirection
The braid of a waterfall weaves
down a canyon wall
hundreds of yards across a gorge
the water stiffening the longer I look,
until the cascade is like paint
dried against the bank
As I notice tossing fir boughs along the rim
of the ravine, I sense the stream winding into itself
once more, the way
the blind can feel motion with one lobe of the brain
without seeing shapes
or knowing their names
Wind-water vision, fill up my edges
with straight indirection—the patience
to turn my gaze
Not "far inferior" at all, the scene filled to the brim with activity and sensation available only through indirection. Michelle Baliff would call this the “ekstatic”—from the Greek meaning out of place or standing outside oneself, unconscious territory inscribed with what bespeaks us from the shadows.
Fantastic discourse here, Frank. I love the morel example. Quite right -- those little devils like to hide in plain sight.
I'm surprised that epiphany isn't part of your experience in science. Not even in thinking about how to set up an experiment or frame a research question? I would imagine that your closing point would apply there, too -- that immersion in science would be a prerequisite for breakthroughs. I mean, you have to get your research ideas from somewhere, even if the investigation of those questions or hypotheses is more dogged...
But you're quite right that there is a long prelude to creative awakening. And in that way, there aren't really any shortcuts to it, either.
In fact, Kounios and Beeman lay out the following stages of creative insight:
Immersion in the problem --> reaching an impasse --> diversion. These three cycle recursively until the leap from the impasse to insight happens (either piecemeal or suddenly). And underlying this conscious process is an unconscious stretch of incubation. There are affinities between this model and Graham Wallas's 1926 model, where Wallas identifies four stages: preparation --> incubation --> illumination --> verification. But Wallas thought that most of this happened consciously. There is also a Geneplore model that I've omitted since the point of this essay was to avoid too much academic jargon. I think the breakthrough for Kounios and Beeman is showing that you can't crack a cognitive impasse by grinding away at it. Diversion allows the unconscious incubation to break through.
I was probably thinking more along the lines of Edison’s 99% perspiration model and his brute forcing his way to a lightbulb filament solution. Or maybe of Franklin, heading back from England to join the Revolution, measuring sea water temperature to establish the boundaries of what we now call the Gulf Stream (not sure which is more remarkable: that a man of nearly 70 years is still ceaselessly collecting data, or that he’s thrown in with a bunch of 30-something revolutionaries).
Ah, I see your point about Edison. Kounios and Beeman would call that just "insight," as opposed to "sudden insight" or "creative insight." Franklin was/is indeed a marvel. He was also a pioneer of sorts in short fiction, writing some delicious satires. "The Speech of Polly Baker" is magnificent.