Oprah is suing an insurance company over their use of the term ‘aha moment’. It’s interesting that she could feel like she owns this term, as it seems to me it was put forth by the Dali Lama or some other mystic in the East. Regardless, I personally think that the aha phenomenon is overrated. It’s understandable how we are all attracted to tales of the apple falling on Newton’s head and inspiring instant brilliance and Archimedes yelling “Eureka!” and jumping out of his bath naked, but my truth has been that ephiphanies come from careful thought and study — indeed, concerted effort — over time. While I would love to say that the best aspects of my book came to me on first draft flashes of brilliance, I learned mostly from things that didn’t work and had to be taken out or re-arranged in order to deliver the kind of clear narrative voice and page-turning structure that I was aiming for in my first novel.

As with the famed ‘aha moment’, I did get the intuitive flash when I eventually got a structural or plot point right, but often this process was woefully short of being instant. It doesn’t surprise me, though, that Oprah peddles this instantaneous approach to ideas. It suggests that, if some kind of magical star alignment occurs, we will happen upon a thunderclap of truth without the time consuming careful study, examination, experimentation and tried and true fact finding that marks the aha moment in the real world.

As writers, we like to believe that we stand apart from the crowd, but my experience has been that hard work, not short cuts, provide excellence just like in any other endeavor. Boring, perhaps, but comforting somehow to view myself as a worker among workers, putting in long hours towards a goal, trusting that in this painstaking process, the ‘aha moments’ will come.