A writer says that when he is working on a book he plans it out fully in advance. And we all have to do something like that to get a commission from a proposal. But actually, writing a book that already exists in full in your head feels just like transcription. Not entirely, of course, because some creative fun begins to happen, if only in the actual language that starts to flow.
Another writer tells me that she doesn't plan at all. She just picks at the thread of an idea and follows it through. The unconscious has assured her that the endeavour is worthwhile and the book reveals itself on its own terms.
And somewhere in between is a third way, a mix of the two approaches.
A fourth way is when you are doing your thinking in the writing. You don't know what you really want to say or even have much confidence that the puzzle will work itself out. That is hard labour but it can be a way of breaking new ground. I think it is more a way of using writing to sharpen your thinking or to break through into a space where ideas will start to flow.
In religious traditions there is the ideas of writing as revelation. In literary tradition there is the similar idea of inspiration. I suspect they refer to the same thing, the momentum of ideas gathering pace so that it feels almost autonomous.
And yet there is another kind of writing I would distinguish that from, and that's automatic writing, where the writer has a flow of words without any sense of understanding them.
Yet even in enthusiastic almost autonomous writing there are occasions when you surprise yourself with the elegance and appositeness of a thought and that is because a lot of the work of writing is done below the conscious, reasoning level, perhaps in the same mental space from which dreams are generated.