letting it run

Author John Hyde Preston once asked Gertrude Stein,

But what if, when you tried to write, you felt
stopped, suffocated, and no words came and if
they came at all they were wooden and without
meaning? What if you had the feeling you could
never write another word?

Gertrude Stein replied, laughing,

Preston the way to resume is to resume. It is the
only way. To resume. If you feel this book deeply
it will come as deep as your feeling is when it is
running truest, and the book will never be truer
or deeper than your feeling. But you do not yet
know anything about your feeling because,
though you may think it is all there, all crystal-
ized, you have not let it run. So how can you
know what it will be? What will be best in it is
what you really do not know now. If you knew it
all it would not be creation but dictation.