Life & Wisdom Quote by Michael O'Donoghue

O'Donoghue is describing the creative high-wire act where craft is half the story and the other half is surrender. The key move is the repeated "feel": not "plan", not "outline", not "argue". He frames writing as somatic navigation, a kind of groping through fog where intuition does the steering and the intellect shows up later to take credit. For a writer best known for his deadpan brutality (National Lampoon, early SNL), that emphasis on the inarticulate is telling. His comedy often pretended to be dumb while being carefully engineered; here he admits the opposite truth too: sometimes the engine is mood, obsession, and an almost superstitious confidence that something will cohere if you keep pushing.

"Mythic" is doing heavy lifting. He's not praising neat plot mechanics; he's chasing the charged, archetypal aftertaste stories can leave when they tap older templates - rituals, monsters, punishment, lust, taboo - without announcing them. That "you don't quite know how you got there" is both humility and a flex. Humility because he refuses the tidy authorial narrative of mastery. A flex because it implies the result feels inevitable, as if discovered rather than manufactured.

The intent, then, is to legitimize a process that looks unprofessional from the outside: wandering, trusting vibes, letting the material dictate tone. The subtext is a defense against literal-minded criticism. If you demand to see the blueprint, you've already missed the point. He's arguing that the strongest work isn't always explainable in workshop terms; it's something you survive and emerge from, changed, with a story that carries its own strange authority.