Goethe said, “About the truest and highest inspiration one can do nothing. One yields as an instrument, even though one may believe they are in control. Then, at a lower level, one gives the work of art its visible structure and that is where mastery and aptitude come into play.”

Following along this path Dorothea Brande in her 1934 classic I recommend to all writers, On Becoming a Writer, suggests that the writer must teach the “unconscious to flow into the channel of writing.” She said that the reverie of the imagination is the primary material of fiction.

Brande offers, “The little Brontes, the infant Alcotts, young Robert Browning, and H.G. Wells all led an intensive dream-life which carried over into their maturity and took another form.”

This form, she suggests, is the written word.

She proposes that the root of genius is in the unconscious, not the conscious mind. “It is not by weighing, balancing, trimming, expanding with conscious intention that an excellent piece of art is born. It takes shape and has its origin outside the region of the conscious intellect. The unconscious must be trusted to bring you aid from a higher level than that on which you ordinarily function.”

Every writer, in some way which they have come upon by luck or long search, puts themselves into a light state of hypnosis.

The attention is held, but just held; there is no serious demand on it. Far behind the mind’s surface, so deep the writer is seldom aware that any activity is going forward, their story is being fused and welded into integrated work.

This process of transmitting one’s intuitive knowledge, of conveying one’s insight at all satisfactorily, may be infinitely laborious (hard!). Years might be spent finding the words for the illumination of one moment. But to confuse the work, the labor, with the genius to be misled. Brande feels that the writer who learns to release this faculty even inexpertly, or when it is released with good luck, discovers an experience in opposition to toiling anxiously and painstakingly. On the contrary, it is the grace of being carried along the creative current.