Do You Have Writer's Brain?
Writing (very entertainingly) in Commentary Magazine, Joseph Epstein begins his article, Writing on the Brain, in the following way:
I was recently asked what it takes to become a writer. Three things, I answered: first, one must cultivate incompetence at almost every other form of profitable work. This must be accompanied, second, by a haughty contempt for all the forms of work that one has established one cannot do. To these two must be joined, third, the nuttiness to believe that other people can be made to care about your opinions and views and be charmed by the way you state them. Incompetence, contempt, lunacy—once you have these in place, you are set to go.
And he concludes with these words:
Where do the words come from? The same mysterious place, I suspect, where notes of music go. They precede ideas, and are inseparable from them. For myself, I bow my head, touch wood, and utter a small prayer that the flow of them never cease.
Motivation, meanwhile, is as various as the subjects upon which one feels called upon to write, varying from time to time, subject to subject. I should like Dr. Flaherty to know that my two motives in writing this essay have been, first, to collect a decent fee, and, second, to try to knock down her book as an assemblage of profoundly muddled notions that I, given my calling, find mildly but genuinely offensive.
In between, he weilds three thousand words to do exactly what he set out to do: tear down Alice Flaherty's reductionistic explaining away of the creative process (Midnight Disease) and expose the fallacies of false ascendency of the neurosciences in its (and her) failed endeavor to dissect the writer's brain.
As I read this essay, my limbic system, particularly my amygdaloid nucleus, was pouring serotonin into the pathways to my higher cerebral integrative centers, producing the illusion of enjoyment and comprehension. Mr. Epstein, I think, would prefer me to just say "I enjoyed it". I think other writers will, too.