Hello everyone! LaVel Moorehead: writer, reader, and book blogger extraordinare here. How are you? ^__^ I'm back with chapter two of Alice W. Flaherty's "The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain." Lets take a look at it, shall we? I want to post a brief run-through of Hypergraphia and theories associated with why writers have it. This is some of the most interesting information on creativity that I've come across. Sure, I've heard about writers being visited by the Muse and being obsessive compulsive. But epilepsy? Manic-depressive disorder?? Schizophrenia? I haven't heard about these diseases being tied to creative writing, but I'll take it. There are a couple of statistics that Ms. Flaherty shared that I'm sure you'll be interested in.
Chapter 2 is called "Literary Creativity and Drive." What causes drive? Ms. Flaherty asks this question and tries to answer it for us. The first idea in this chapter that she comes out with in this first book is that hypergraphia, left unchecked can lead to poor writing. Near the end of the chapter, she says that these kinds of writers need to have a good editor to counteract their onslaught of text. I totally agree and you'll see why later.
I won't get to sciencey on you, but we must discuss the relevant parts of the brain to understand what affects creativity. The limbic system controls drives. Ms. Flaherty wants us to distinguish between creativity and drives, although they affect one another. Drive doesn't necessarily mean that what you write is on a Jane Austen level, but it CAN lead up to it. I will list the three stages on creativity here.
Psychologist Dean Simonton came up with the "Darwinian Theory of Creativity." Neat, huh? The first one is where a writer produces many different ideas. Second, he or she weeds these ideas. Third is when the writer draws more ideas from the good ideas and the process repeats itself again. So creativity essentially is a never ending cycle. :D It never ends and we as writers should be asking other people who are knowledgeable or in the business in writing questions to weed ideas out.
Okay, so here are the three theories on creativity and where it comes from. The first is a "psychoanalytic model" (can you repeat THAT again) that basically promotes the idea that creativity lives in the unconscious. This Freudian model suggests that creativity needs a balance between primary and secondary processes. The first process is emotion driven and the second is logic driven. Look at this cool quote from the text: "Modern researchers have found some experimental evidence that creative people have better access to primary process thought. They fantasize more, have better memory of their dreams, are more easily hypnotized, and score higher on measure of mildly psychotic traits." So essentially, us writers are the ones with the best imaginations! ^__^ I would hope so. I wish that Ms. Flaherty added a bit more data on why researchers say this. It would have made her argument more defined.
The second theory revolves around cognitive psychologists. They say that creativity resides in divergent and convergent thinking. An example of divergent thinking is someone "making as many useful things out of a paperclip as he/she can" while convergent can be solving a word problem. It's more along the lines of the scientific method. Writers 1. define a problem. 2. learn as much as they can about it. 3. let the problem "incubate subconsciously" when they find it hard to solve the problem 4. find several ideas to overcome the problem 5. they test the ideas. That's how this second theory works. A little too mechanical for my taste. I know that some writers do test certain scenes and certain ideas and see which ones flow better. However, many writers write on a whim and don't keep going back to a scene. Again, it would be fantastic to have data showing what's true or not but this is fairly knew, I'm assuming.
The third theory states that mental illness is the cause for hypergraphia. 0_0 Really?? The rate of mental illness in creative people versus those outside the arts is 70% to 25%. Somehow, I find it hard to believe that the rate for those in the arts is so high, but I'll take Ms. Flaherty at her word..for now. ;) As I said before, illnesses such as schizophrenia, manic depression, and epilepsy are linked to creative writing. Even drugs have been linked to creative writing! Samuel Taylor Coleridge and Thomas de Quincey used opium to make their imagination more vivid. Scary, but true. Apparently, it worked with their writing.
Ms. Flaherty finds that creativity is linked between both hemispheres of the brain but creativity is especially linked to the right hemisphere. The temporal lobes also play a unique and significant role with creativity. A 51 year old woman named Bruce Miller had her temporal lobes damaged. She painted so much from 51 to the age of 71 and her creativity slowed and the amount of paintings decreased because the damage increased over time. Sad, huh? Ms. Flaherty concludes that it's safe to say that temporal lobes do not drive creativity but suppress it. It doesn't seem that the damage caused creativity because the woman showed signs of being a hermit and possibly being depressed. That could have spurred her creative juices. No one really knows, but it's interesting to think about.
I'll leave you with a quote from Plato. He has very terse words to say about poets being devoid of inspiration! "He who approaches the temple of the muses without inspiration in the belief that craftsmanship alone suffices, will remain a bungler and his presumptuous poetry will be obscured by the songs of the maniacs." 0__0 Wow. From the time of the Greeks, they recognized that creativity was linked with epilepsy and other diseases. And he's absolutely true. If you're writing just to write without thinking out your ideas, it's basically useless text. But if you're waiting for you ideas to bubble in that pot of creativity (and let's be honest, you have to put your ideas through a vetting process), readers will appreciate your work more. I can't wait to get back into my stories and let y'all see how much I've put my work through the proverbial grinder. I'll see y'all tomorrow. :-D
-LaVel
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