A Recent History of Writing And Drawing

The ideas of Helen Smith greatly influenced the Surrealist movement. The Surrealists dubbed her "The Muse of Automatic Writing"; in the surrealist deck of cards, Helen Smith is the "Genius of Knowledge." Automatic writing became a major part of the Surrealist's repertoire of games, and it soon developed into a number of other surrealist games that greatly influenced the movement, such as automatic drawing and a variety of marker-word games.

Free writing latterly gained popularity with writers and poets, both as a means of stimulating creative thought and as a technique for overcoming writer's block.

Automatic writing as a mode of writing which seeks to escape the constraints of logic. It was used by the writers of Surrealism. It consists in "writing all that passes to us by the head".