In 1890, French writer Paul Bourget expressed the importance of ideas in an analogy: Ideas are to literature what light is to painting. For many creative people, ideas are like a flash flood, arriving without advance warning and carrying everything along with it. It can be a frenzied process, and there is always the danger that the torrent will engulf a writer, who is trying to put the key elements of the idea into words before it exits the mind. This may have been what F. Scott Fitzgerald had in mind when he once wrote in a letter to his daughter: All good writing is swimming under water and holding your breath. At one time or another, all writers have tried to describe the process of transforming ideas into words on a page. But nobody has ever captured the drama better than Honoré de Balzac: Ideas quick-march into motion like battalions of a grand army to its legendary fighting ground, and the battle rages. Memories charge in, bright flags on high; the cavalry of metaphor deploys with a magnificent gallop; the artillery of logic rushes up with clattering wagons and cartridges; flashes of wit pop up like sharpshooters; forms and shapes and characters rear up; the paper is spread with ink.
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