On breakthroughs

Jennie Godfrey’s Eureka moment. Exploring the ‘Aha! experience’ & what it feels like when an idea arrives.

Hey there, Bec here

“I still get goosebumps now!” Jennie Godfrey tells me how it felt when the idea for her novel The List of Suspicious Things arrived fully formed.

Jennie had given up a stressful corporate career and saved up enough money to survive for six, perhaps 12 months. While she was figuring out what to do with her life she decided to write a book. 20,000 words into writing a ‘terrible’ psychological thriller (her own words) she hit an impasse. The novel wasn’t working - she was writing what she thought readers wanted, but it was just chasing a trend at the time. She abandoned the book and cleaned the house from top to bottom.¹

She explained what happened next in her wonderful newsletter The Crow’s Nest.²

“A few days later the idea for The List of Suspicious Things just appeared in my mind, fully formed. I knew immediately that it was ‘the one.’ This was the book of my heart. The hairs on my arms stood up, my heart started beating faster, and I ran home (the dog annoyed at having his walk curtailed) to start making notes.”

- Jennie Godfrey

Eureka! I have found it

Throughout history writers, artists, scientists and inventors have described their experience of breakthroughs. Take ancient Greek mathematician Archimedes. His burst of inspiration, a scientific breakthrough so fantastic and urgent that he leapt out of the bath and ran down the street shouting ‘Eureka!’ In addition to livening up every schoolchild’s science textbook with his naked bottom, his cry ‘I have found it’ has come to define the aha moment.

Researchers have compiled the characteristics of the eureka experience. The first attribute being suddenness - the breakthrough arrives immediately and often in a surprising way.

The second attribute is ease.

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Do you remember a breakthrough moment? Or a block? We’d love to hear your experience as we research our next book. Tell us in this anonymous questionnaire: The Experience of Creative Work

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Archimedes had been puzzling over a problem set by the soon-to-be crowned king, a brutal military commander Heiro, and the stakes were high. A wrong answer could be punishable by death. So the story goes, Archimedes found the solution when he stepped away from it, beginning the traditional ritual of cleansing and washing before stepping into the public baths for his daily dip. It arrived in a flash, suddenly and without effort, the answer was before him.

Suddenness and ease are the definitional features of insight, there are two others that often accompany that moment: positive effect and confidence.

When we get a new idea or find a solution to an intractable problem, it feels good. Having ideas is gratifying and figuring out a puzzle is satisfying. It also brings a sense of confidence that we are right. We judge the solution to be true and that confidence motivates us. ³

Downloading an idea

While Archimedes story is apocryphal and embellished over time, Jennie’s is fresh in her mind; recalling is still brings out goosebumps. She goes on to tell me:

“It was a curious mixture of excitement and a deep, secure certainty that this was ‘it’ I absolutely knew it would change my life and I never lost that sense even when I panicked because I didn’t have a clue what I was doing.

It felt as though someone had given me the most generous gift, and my only fear was how I would do it justice.”

She might not have know what she was doing, but she certainly did the idea justice. The List of Suspicious Things was the biggest debut novel of 2024 and has remained a bestseller in the UK. It has recently been published in America and in its first few weeks has garnered huge sales, great reviews, and much love from readers. I adore this story set in the 1970s West Yorkshire and its central character 12-year-old Miv who sets out with friends to investigate a real-world killer in her community.⁴

After her original ‘download’, Jennie was worried she’d never have another idea. She said she “struggled to get an idea for book two”. It was only when she’d given up all hope and decided to not write another novel that an idea arrived.⁵ Her follow up The Barbecue at No. 9 is published in the UK on 12 February 2026.

Has reading this sparked any memories of breakthroughs? Do fill in our questionnaire and let us know how creativity feels. And if you are stuck in an impasse or experiencing a block there’s space to share that too.

Keep writing, Bec

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In summary: the four characteristics of an ‘aha’ experience

1. Suddenness - the experience is surprising and immediate

2. Ease - the solution is processed without difficulty

3. Positive effect - insights are gratifying

4. Feeling of being right - we judge the solution to be true and have confidence in it

From: Gaining insight into the ‘Aha’ experience⁶

1. Hello footnote friends. I massively over wrote this post so am sharing a few of my favourite detours down here. When Jennie said she’d cleaned the house I remembered Elizabeth Gilbert’s 2009 TED Talk Your elusive creative genius where she talks about the Ancient Roman concept of genius as a disembodied creative spirit . She said:

“They believed that a genius was this, sort of magical divine entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist’s studio, kind of like Dobby the house elf, and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work.”

I wonder whether cleaning woke up Jennie’s daemon and roused it to action. Perhaps my tidying isn’t procrastination but an essential first step in creativity?

2. ‘But, how?’ by Jennie Godfrey on Substack.

3. Perhaps this explains why Archimedes was so emboldened to run down the street without his clothes.

4. I was interested in Jennie’s language here, using ‘download’ as if the whole idea was complete and handed to her like a ‘gift’. I find that analogy fascinating. A download, mostly used in digital terms is a ‘process of transferring from the storage of a larger system to that of a smaller one.’ It reminded me of an episode of The Telepathy Tapes where Ky Dickens explores the nature of creativity:

“ideas are conscious entities outside of ourselves that do not come from us, but to us. Artists are sort of antennae who absorb ideas. That ideas swirl around the world looking for human collaborators, knocking on our doors and tapping on our shoulders and coming to us in the form of inspiration. This may sound like a wild idea. But stay with me, because as fanciful as it sounds, countless artists and inventors across history have described something similar, ideas or inspiration coming to them, often fully formed from somewhere outside of themselves.”

Have you listened to it? I’d love to hear what you think of The Consciousness of Creativity: Are ideas alive and do they choose us?

5. This is a common experience before breakthroughs, the impasse Jennie describes when she gave up her first novel and then her fear of never getting another idea for her second. More on this struggle when we explore blocks in future posts.

6. Topolinski, S. & Reber, R. (2010). Gaining insight into the “aha” experience. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 19(6), 402–405.