For thousands of years we’ve had theories and rules about writing based on tradition, philosophy, esthetics, poetics, scholarship, mysticism, and arbitrary dictates. Meanwhile, 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.

Peter Gelfan has been a book editor for more than 25 years, editing for writers ranging from best-selling authors to first-timers. His novel Found Objects was published in 2013 and Monkey Temple in 2019. He lives in New York City, where he continues to write, work as a freelance book editor, and tutor writing in a public high school as part of PEN’s Writers in the Schools program.