When Cassandra turned down god, Apollo’s sexual advances she was cursed to be able to predict the future but suffer none of her predictions being believed. In the end it drove her mad.
I intended to start this piece with a mention of my latest book, Intentional: How to Live, Love, Work and Play Meaningfully but in the end, as I was planning it, Hemingway’s insistence of starting anything difficult by writing down “one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” became impossible to ignore, for reasons that I am about to explain.
Writing, in any form, is an adventure. It is also a consummate act of communication whereby something that first takes place deep behind our eyes, within the darkness of our skull, perceived by an agency that we barely understand; is presented to the world in a format that allows many other people to absorb and perceive it in that dark place behind their eyes, where their own sense of agency resides.
To understand how we get to this seemingly wondrous state of information exchange it is necessary to briefly explore the neuroscience of writing. A process via which a writer becomes a receiver of information that must be encoded through the process of writing and then transmitted in a way that will allow it to be decoded by as many people as possible.
