I’m an agnostic, on my most curmudgeonly days an atheist, but there’s something spiritual about writing. And I like writing. I can only describe being a writer as someone who expresses the landscape of their inner world while making contact with the landscape of the outer world. Mystical, freaky, and semi-creepy—right?

The best writing is unpredictable. As I write this sentence, and as you read it, it’s ever becoming what it is, its meaning ever emerging from the process of its being written. If it sounds as if my writing has no plan, it’s because you’re right. Serendipity steers my mind and keyboard and pen—and frankly my life—into unknown territory, largely by the seat of my pants. The best sentence structure is unpredictable: it teeters, some words and phrases sidestepping the reader’s and my own forecasts of how the sentence will develop. Some writing is formulaic—our educational institutions have unfortunately inculcated “convention” into its pupils—but the best embraces the stochasticity of the mind that produces it.

What’s remarkable is that despite the feelings of fortuity and unpredictability that an author has when writing, the words, sentences, paragraphs, and whole works that emerge seem intentional and predictable post hoc. Moments that seemed to have teetered mid-sentence, when the author was intuiting where their mind would pilot their pen’s next move, appear after the fact less functions of erratic mental oscillations than entailments of calculated logic. The magic of how the words appear on the page disappears if we only care for the finished product, the words on the page, not the process which brings them into being.

Reminder of the thesis at hand: this process is mystical, freaky, and semi-creepy. When one writes they must predictively read minds: when one writes, they must understand the possible combinations of neural states, and therefore thoughts and emotions and moods and memories, their writing might evoke in their audience after it enters their eyeballs. The story of what occurs when we write becomes more mysterious when we consider that the author intends to convey something to their reader, and hence evoke something in their mind, but that this something, I’ll remind you, originates from a mind, the author’s, which itself less so operates on intention than serendipity at the time of writing that something. To furth...

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