It doesn’t matter if your ideas come from your mind, your heart, your soul, your belly button, the tops of mountains, a bottle of red wine, or from managing an in-house spider colony (this was Salvidore Dali’s process). No matter how you arrive, conscious or unconscious, giddy or trampled, a finished work is imbued with legible patterns that determine how it’s experienced by others.

David Foster Wallace had a similar piece of advice for writers: “the reader cannot read your mind.” You don’t get to live in the margins and clarify confusion or expand on your implicit intentions.
Process is extremely important, but more so for the writer than the reader. If your rituals, feelings, and psychology are out of sync, you might not show up to make anything in the first place. It has to be fun. But at a certain point, you need to make the flip and take responsibility for being understood. You write the first draft for yourself, but you write the second draft for a stranger.
So maybe essays always start through some idiosyncratic, non-formulaic, mysterious big-bang, but since readers—by nature of being human— have shared features like curiosity, memory, attention, and linearity, there’s a science in how to make your ideas understandable.
What makes an idea memorable? What makes it believable? How come some titles are catchier than others? How do I hook a reader, orient them, and hold their attention? Why should prose be musical and visual? What are the intangible dimensions of voice? … Are these the right questions? Are there singular answers to all of them? And if so, what would happen if you knew them? Mastered them?

I'm interested in the author's three core questions for guiding the writer (What makes a great idea? How do you give it form? Are you writing with voice) and how these cascaded into the 27 guididing principles for the essay writer. it would be cool to venture into his essay writing course and take a look around inside.