When Words Seem to Read Your Mind

"Most if not all human lives are full of fantasy--passive daydreaming which need not be acted on.  But to write poetry or fiction, or even to think well, is not to fantasize or put fantasies on paper. For a poem to coalesce, for a character or an action to take shape, there has to be an imaginative transformation of reality which is in no way passive. And a certain freedom of mind is needed-- freedom to press on, to enter the currents of your thought like a glider pilot, knowing that your motion can be sustained, that the buoyancy of your attention will not be suddenly snatched away. Moreover, if the imagination is to transcend and transform experience it has to question, to challenge, to conceive of alternatives, perhaps to the very life you are living at that moment.You have to be free to play around with the notion that day might be night, love might be hate; nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite or to call experimentally by another name. For writing is re-naming." 

-Adrienne Rich from When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision