HURLING WORDS INTO DARKNESS

A guide offers writing advice with a cognitive science twist.

There are plenty of books on writing, many of which recycle ideas about art and storytelling that are, in some cases, thousands of years old. “Meanwhile,” argues Gelfan in his introduction, “over only the past few decades, cognitive science has discovered much about how the human mind sees and orders the world and extracts meaning from it. It’s high time we mix some brain science into our thinking about reading and writing.” The author challenges would-be writers to get inside the minds of their very human audiences and ask themselves: Why do people read? In Gelfan’s view, it’s the result of an evolutionary imperative. The human mind is always on the quest for experience, and a book is perhaps the greatest approximation of a first-person adventure that readers can enjoy at their leisure. From applying “theory of mind” to character development to thinking of realism as a kind of “vegetarian meat,” the author tackles the fundamentals of fiction in perhaps the most basic way anyone has dealt with them before. The book is slim—only about 100 pages—which contributes to the sense that it is just covering the essentials. Gelfan’s prose is concise and elegant, as here where he offers some thoughts about dialogue: “Whatever a character says, the dialogue will better serve you and the reader if it adds a new slant, a surprise, a glimpse of how the speaker’s mind works, reveals a hidden element, raises a question, or at least makes us laugh.” The volume is not overly scientific—the author is a writer and editor, not an anthropologist—but it nevertheless manages to eke out its own philosophical bent. Even fairly conventional pieces of advice, like the counsel concerning dialogue, feel fresh when introduced in the context of lighting up different corners of readers’ primitive brains. In a crowded genre, this craft guide makes a lasting impression.

An illuminating writing manual with an evolutionary focus.