The Eureka Experience

The creative process fascinates me for reasons both personal and scientific. In a few weeks I will be making lots of noise about my newest book. Today I want to concentrate on the writing itself and when the creative process works and when it fails and fails miserably.

From the beginning the book was a challenge. I was so worried I would miss my deadline (yet again) that I started writing before I knew the characters. The result was a book that needed much editorial help and a long revision. The whole process was such a challenge that I had one of those "When this is done I quit" moments. Since I am well into the next book I can assure that feeling did pass. By the time I wrote the last chapter I was delighted with STRANGER'S KISS and can't wait to share it with readers.

With that miserable experience and almost failure in mind, I decided that I would not start the next book until I KNEW my characters. There followed six weeks filled with all kinds of work related to writing plus reading, ironing, gardening. Deep down I worried that I was wasting time.

At week four, when I was about to cave and start something -- anything -- I came across an article in the Wall Street Journal. The headline read "A Wandering Mind Heads Straight Toward Insight." I am going to quote from the article because I want to get it right and I think you might find it as reassuring as I did.

Did you know we spend "about a third of our time day-dreaming?" The good side of all that "wasted" time is that "our brain is unusually active during these seemingly idle moments." (If there are any blog readers still in school -- print out the article and give it to your teacher the next time he/she tells you to "Stop daydreaming!"

Remind your teacher that Sir Issac Newton was sitting in an orchard "daydreaming" when he saw an apple fall and according to the WSJ velcro, post-it notes and ice cream cones struck the inventors in what WSJ Science Journal columnist Robert Lee Holtz calls "Eureka moments"

Thanks to a recent study researchers have been able to "document the brain's behavior during Eureka moments by recording brain wave patterns and imaging the neural circuits that become active as volunteers struggle to solve anagrams, riddles and other brain teasers."

This is what they found -- that you need more than methodical thinking to solve some problems. "Solving a problem with insight is fundamentally different from solving a problem analytically". Personally, I can't decide if this is stating the obvious or not, but it is such a validation of my six weeks "off" that I cannot resist sharing it.

How many time have you stepped away from a crossword puzzle and when you come back the answers have moved to the front of your consciousness? How many times have gone for a walk and come back with the answer to a plot issue?

There is another intriguing fact that scientists discovered as they explored the way the brain transmits these eureka moments. In two different studies of brain wave patterns, the testing scientists discovered that the brain apparently knows the answer for a period of time before "the volunteer experienced the insight." This is not news to me. At some point in the process of writing a book, I know what the last scene will be and write it. That final scene written is a message to my conscious self that my subconscious knows the story to the end, well before I am aware of it. Now I have a scientific way of explaining something I figured out instinctively several books ago.

In fact this article is one more way to look at the creative process. Neuroscientist Dr Kalina Christoff at the University of British Columbia had the last word in the article: "We often assume that if we don't notice our thoughts they don't exist,when we don't notice them is when we may be thinking most creatively."

To which I respond, I knew that.....Take a minute and share your creative process (even if you're not a writer) and your favorite "eureka moment."