I’m fairly certain I’ve written before about the kinds of epiphanies you can experience as a writer, at any time and place, where suddenly all the figurative obstacles of a particular narrative point blow away and a light shines through. It’s those moments that for me make all the stress of wrangling an ongoing story worth the trouble, because preceding it are always those times where you feel like you’ve “painted yourself into a corner” with the tale so far and there’s no clean way out. That’s a suffocating feeling, and the confident decision you made a few weeks, months, or even years back might have you regretting that you didn’t take another track.

But I’ve learned through many of these moments to trust myself and my instincts. It helps immensely to have a wife who occasionally admits she thinks I’m some sort of magician at this point for the way I can continue to produce meaningful progression of a nearly ten year old story, weaving in elements that may give an entirely new but still plausible way to look at older stuff. Sometimes it’s all planned, and sometimes I’ll admit that I’m just an opportunist who has that flash of insight that the stuff I worried might be off-topic or meandering nonsense had a point after all.

It’s weird to think of interpreting your own text, and yet if you write the same story for long enough, I think it’s bound to happen sooner or later. Your brain connects the dots you didn’t quite see clearly.

That’s what I tell myself, anyhow. And hey, when life hasn’t exactly been free of stress, you take whatever epiphanies you can interpret.