You won't believe who's trying to sabotage your novel.

+ exactly how to fight back, kapow!

Lately I’ve been thinking about how our brains evolved to be totally out of sync with the modern world.

We crave quick calories in the form of ultra-processed foods.

We spend all day indoors, far from nature, sitting at desks and staring at screens.

We get dopamine hits from likes and shares, like rats banging away at that lever in a Skinner box.

We can order sneakers, keyboards, candy bars, and Korean food with a few taps—and we don’t even have to get out of our pajamas to do it.

Cave painters probably struggled to convince themselves to pick up the paintbrush, too. (Photo by Ulkar Batista)

I’m not a huge proponent of evolutionary biology as an explanation—let alone an excuse!—for our most base behavior (yes, modern humans are fully capable of resisting the temptation to hurt and rape and kill, thank you).

But there’s absolutely something to the fact that, biologically, we aren’t so different from early homo sapiens. Our brains are happiest when we’re warm, home, fully sated, and exerting as a little metabolic energy as possible…even if our mental and physical health would like a word with the ol’ cerebrum.

What does this have to do with fiction writing? Lots.

I see it all the time with my consulting clients: They’re only a few thousand words into their new novel manuscript, but already, they’re at a standstill because they can’t figure out something relatively minor—whether to write in present tense or past tense, for example, or whether a secondary character should be a man or a woman. (Sound familiar?)