Randomness.

So I was sitting in American Lit the other day, actually paying attention (we're reading Nathaniel Hawthorne and I enjoy his works) and I came across a passage I thought was really intersting.

If the imaginative faculty refused to act at such [a late] hour, it might well be deemed a hopless case. Moonlight, in a familiar room, falling so white upon the carpet, and showing all its figures so distinctly,--making every object so minutely visible, yet so unlike a morning or noontide visibility,--is a medium the most suitable for a romance-writer to get acquainted with his illusive guests. There is the little domestic scenery of the well-known apartment; the chairs, with each its separate individuality; the centre-table, sustaining a work-basket, a volume or two, and an extinguished lamp; the sofa; the book-case; the picture on the wall; all these details, so completely seen, they seem to lose their actual substance, and become things of intellect. Nothing is too small or too trifling to undergo this chang, and acquire dignity thereby.

[...]

Thus, therefore, the floor of our familiar room has become a neatural territory, somewhere between the real world and fairy-land, where the Actual and the Imaginary may meet, and each [ingrain] itself with the nature of the other. Ghosts might enter here, without affrightening us.

I think this is a beautiful passage and quite eloquent. He's talking about how romance is not simply a novel, but something else. It is a blending of reality and the imagined. The way he speaks of the moonlight...it's amazing. A writer must be surrounded by the surreal and almost mystical light of the moon to be able to properly write a real and believable romance.