How do I start automatic writing?

Sit with pen on paper in a relaxed state, ask a question or open yourself to receive, and then begin writing without stopping to think or edit. Keep the pen moving even if what emerges is nonsense at first. The key is to bypass the editorial mind and allow the hand to write independently of conscious direction.

Is automatic writing dangerous?

Automatic writing as a psychological and creative practice carries no inherent danger. Those who practice it as spirit communication may wish to work with protective frameworks appropriate to their tradition. Anyone with a history of psychosis or dissociation should approach trance-based practices with care and ideally with guidance from a mental health professional.

What is the difference between automatic writing and journaling?

Journaling involves the conscious, directed self writing reflectively about experience. Automatic writing attempts to bypass conscious direction entirely, allowing material to emerge without the writer choosing what to write. In practice the boundary can blur, but the intention and the quality of attention are different.

Who are some famous examples of automatic writing?

The poet W.B. Yeats and his wife Georgie Hyde-Lees conducted extensive automatic writing sessions that produced the material later published as A Vision. The Brazilian medium Chico Xavier produced enormous volumes of written material through automatic writing attributed to deceased personalities. Surrealist artists including Andre Breton used automatic writing as a creative technique to access unconscious material.

Automatic Writing: Technique, History, and Practice

Automatic writing is the practice of writing without conscious direction, holding the pen and allowing the hand to move across the page while the ordinary editorial mind is quieted or set aside. The resulting text is understood, depending on the practitioner’s framework, as material from the unconscious mind, as communication from spiritual presences or the higher self, or as messages from the deceased. The practice has roots in nineteenth-century Spiritualism and was also taken up by Surrealist artists as a technique for bypassing rational censorship to reach deeper creative material.

What automatic writing practitioners share across these different frameworks is the conviction that ordinary waking consciousness, with its habits of self-censorship, rational ordering, and narrative control, stands between the writer and something that wants to come through. The technique is designed to thin that barrier and allow more direct access to what lies behind it.

History and origins

Automatic writing emerged prominently within the nineteenth-century Spiritualist movement as one of several techniques for receiving communications from the dead. Mediums who could write automatically, often called writing mediums, were valued for their ability to produce extended texts purportedly dictated by deceased individuals, sometimes without looking at the page or while engaged in conversation with others in the room.

The Surrealist movement, founded in France in the 1920s by Andre Breton, explicitly borrowed automatic writing from Spiritualism and reframed it as a psychological and artistic technique. In the Surrealist understanding, the technique bypassed the censor of the rational mind to access the creative unconscious: not spirit communication, but something equally uncanny and potentially equally generative. Breton’s Surrealist Manifesto (1924) described automatic writing (ecriture automatique) as the definitive Surrealist method.

In Spiritualist and New Thought contexts, some of the most extensive claimed instances of automatic writing produced substantial literary or philosophical material. Pearl Curran’s communications, ostensibly from a seventeenth-century woman named Patience Worth, produced poetry and prose that received serious literary attention. The Irish poet W. B. Yeats and his wife Georgie Hyde-Lees produced A Vision through automatic writing sessions, which became the theoretical foundation for much of Yeats’s mature poetry.

The Brazilian tradition of Spiritism, founded on the writings of Allan Kardec, places automatic writing within a developed theological and social framework. Chico Xavier, one of Brazil’s most celebrated Spiritist mediums, produced hundreds of books through psychographed (automatically written) texts attributed to various deceased personalities. This tradition continues actively in Brazil today.

In practice

The basic mechanics of automatic writing are simple. The subtler skill lies in learning to genuinely step aside from conscious direction and to stay in that state long enough for material to emerge.

A method you can use

Prepare your space and your tools. Many practitioners prefer writing by hand on paper rather than typing, as the physical act of pen-on-page seems to support the required receptive state more readily. Have more paper than you think you will need.

Ground yourself and settle into a calm, open state. If you work with spiritual guides, ancestors, or your higher self, take a moment to address that presence and state your openness to receive whatever is useful to know.

Place your pen on the page and begin writing. Do not choose your words. Do not pause to think. Do not lift the pen from the page. If nothing comes, write “nothing is coming” or simply repeat a word until something shifts. Keep the pen moving.

Write without reading what you are producing. This is important in the early stages: the moment you read and evaluate what has appeared, the editorial mind reactivates and breaks the flow. Write for at least ten to fifteen minutes without stopping.

When you feel the session has naturally concluded, stop. Close intentionally if you work within a framework that includes opening and closing. Then, and only then, read what you have produced.

The first reading often produces surprise. Some of what appears will be obvious material dressed up slightly differently. Some may be genuinely unexpected. Look for the passages that feel different in texture from your ordinary inner voice, those that use different vocabulary, take unexpected angles on a question, or say something you didn’t know you knew.

Development over time

Automatic writing responds strongly to consistent practice. Regular sessions, even brief ones, build the practitioner’s capacity to shift into the receptive state more readily and to produce longer, more coherent material. It is worth maintaining a dedicated journal for this practice, separate from ordinary journaling, so that the material accumulates and can be reviewed over time for patterns, recurring themes, and the gradual clarification of what voice or perspective is emerging.

Many experienced practitioners describe developing a distinct felt sense of when automatic writing is “on,” when the material is arising from a genuinely different place than ordinary self-expression. That felt sense is itself cultivated through practice and reflection, and it is perhaps the most valuable thing the practice builds.

In myth and popular culture

Automatic writing has a rich history in both spiritual and literary culture. W. B. Yeats and his wife Georgie Hyde-Lees conducted extensive sessions from 1917 onward, producing the material Yeats eventually shaped into “A Vision” (1925), a complex cosmological and historical system. Yeats treated the material with complete seriousness as a genuine spirit transmission, and it became the scaffolding for much of his mature poetry, including “The Second Coming” and “Sailing to Byzantium.”

The Surrealist movement, founded by Andre Breton in Paris in the early 1920s, adopted automatic writing as its defining creative method. Breton’s “Surrealist Manifesto” (1924) described “pure psychic automatism” as the way to express the functioning of thought in the absence of rational control. Surrealist writers and artists including Philippe Soupault, Louis Aragon, and later Salvador Dali and Max Ernst worked with various forms of automatism, though the visual artists extended the principle to drawing and painting rather than text.

Chico Xavier, the Brazilian Spiritist medium, produced more than four hundred books through psychographed writing attributed to various deceased personalities, becoming one of the most prolific and celebrated mediums in the Brazilian Spiritist tradition. His work spans poetry, fiction, science, and philosophy. Xavier was nominated for the Nobel Peace Prize in 2010 and remains one of the most beloved figures in Brazilian popular culture.

Pearl Curran, an American housewife who began receiving automatic writing communications in 1913 ostensibly from a seventeenth-century English woman named Patience Worth, produced poetry and historical fiction through the practice that received serious literary attention. The Patience Worth material remains one of the more extensively documented and puzzling cases in the history of automatic writing.

Myths and facts

Several misconceptions about automatic writing deserve straightforward correction.

A common assumption is that automatic writing must be done by hand to be genuine. While many practitioners prefer pen on paper for the quality of attention it requires, keyboard-based automatic writing is practiced by many people with consistent results. The medium matters less than the state of receptive attention.
Many people believe that coherent or literary material produced through automatic writing must have come from an external source, since they could not have written it themselves. Research in psychology and cognitive science suggests that a great deal of complex, apparently creative material exists in the unconscious and can surface through procedures that bypass ordinary editorial control, without requiring an external communicator.
The idea that automatic writing is always safe and gentle is not accurate. For those with a history of dissociation or with psychological conditions that affect the boundary between self and other, practices that deliberately dissolve ordinary conscious control require care and ideally professional guidance.
Some practitioners claim that automatic writing is a reliably accurate source of information about the future or about specific facts. The content produced through automatic writing varies enormously in accuracy when checked against verifiable facts, and treating it as infallible guidance is a mistake that many experienced practitioners have made and corrected.
There is a belief that the material produced through automatic writing always comes from either the unconscious mind or from spirits, and that practitioners must choose one explanation. Both psychological and spiritual frameworks can meaningfully describe what happens in the practice, and holding the question open while attending carefully to the content itself is a more productive approach than insisting on a single explanation.