The author repeatedly stresses the importance of imagination in writing: “For a poem to coalesce . . . there has to be an imaginative transformation of reality”; “if the imagination is to transcend and transform experience, it has to question . . . to conceive of alternatives . . . to the very life you are living at that moment”; “nothing can be too sacred for the imagination to turn into its opposite.” The author clearly deems the active imagination a necessary prerequisite to writing well, so A is correct.