Hello everyone. This is LaVel Moorehead: writer, reader, and book blogger extraordinare. How are you doing this weekend? I'm doing absolutely fantastic! I went out with my dad this afternoon to Longhorn resteraunt and we had some good food. I had some golden friend shrimp and let me tell you...it was divine! I've been craving some good shrimp for awhile so my wishes were fulfilled today. Thank God! :)
So, what am I up to now? I'm in my novelette "The DNA of Souls" of course, which is a science fiction story. It's all about alien cyborgs and humans who have come to their planet. Will their be war? What is the conflic in the story? One thing that I will tell you now that you'll see when you read the story is that the main character is a prisoner. Oh no! That's all I'll say for now. :)
"The Midnight Disease," Chapter 1: The Incurable Disease of Writing. Ms. Alice W. Flaherty really digs deep with this chapter and looks and the temporal lobes and the limbic system which affect creative writing. Now, I know you're saying "what is all this scientific stuff?!" I asked that question myself. Don't worry! The author breaks the information in this chapter into easy-to-understand language. I said before that I love Ms. Flaherty's use of anecdotes to inject interest into what can seem to be heavy hitting facts. It's not what you think. I'll try to break down this chapter into understandable terms for y'all. So here we go. :)
I want to share this quote from the end of chapter 1. It really got me thinking and it's really funny to me. A writer named Victoria Nelson (quoted by Ms. Flaherty) describes a writer expriencing hypergraphia or extreme drive of writing versus someone experiencing Writer's Block. This is pg. 47. "The extraordinary prolific witer whose output flows unchecked is often of awe for the blocked writer who, envying him in the same way that an overweight person envies the anorexic, fails to see this deluge of words often conceals an inverted case of writer's block. Like Hans Christian Andersen's little dancer who couldn't get the enchanted red shoes off her feet, the compulsive writer cannot stop writing. Compulsive writing is, in fact, a way of hiding from some of the deeper demands of literary and emotional experience."
Ms. Flaherty follows up on Ms. Nelson's quote and says that Nelson distrustful of writers who don't write enough or write too much. Originally I would have asked if a writer could "write too much," but there is a line where writing too much can get in the way of the basics: eating, sleeping, etc. However in this chapter, Ms. Flaherty writes about writers that experienced hypergraphia and dealt with issues such as depression and mania through their writing. It seems that writing came as more of a valuable asset than a hinderance during their mental conditions. Although many of these writers wrote a lot, it didn't seem like something that threw them off of the boat of life. Let's get a glimpse at Ms. Flaherty's knowledge.
This is quite interesting! Alice W. Flaherty cites two neurologists named Stephen Waxman and Norman Geschwind: tells us that patients without hypergraphia wrote 78 words to describe their condition. Patients with hypergraphia described their condition in approximately 5,000 words. Incredible, no? This is just a taste of what hypergraphia is. Remember my last post? I described the temporal lobes and the limbic system. The temporal lobes relates to creativity in most writers. There are 4temporal lobes, 2 in each of the brains hemispheres. Ms. Flaherty describes the hemispheres as "boxing gloves" and the temporal lobes as the "thumbs." They are right behind the ears if you want to get a more basic thought of where they're located. Anyway, the 4 temporal lobes have different functions. The first is the main temporal lobe, related to memory storage. The second is the frontal lobe, which is related to judgement, initiation of action, and movement. Two is the parietal lobe, which is related to the sense of touch and movement. The fourth is the occipital lobe, which is related to visual processing. Got that all down? Hah, that's just the beginning. :)
The limbic system (which I talked about in my earlier post) regulates drives. It's "buried underneath the hempisheres" as Ms. Flaherty comments so if you want to look up the limbic system on a brain hempshere photo, you may not see it.
Now from all of this, where do these extreme medical conditions come in? I'll tell you. Do you know what epilepsy is? It's a chronic condition where one experiences seizures. People with epilepsy may have symptoms between seizures (also known as interictal symptoms). Hypergraphia is an interictal symptom! Those with temporal lobe epilepsy have five conditions known as the Geschwind Syndrome: hypergraphia, hyper-religiousity or hyperphilosophicality, altered sexuality (usually diminished sexual drive), overinclusiveness (such as talkitiveness). Ms. Flaherty says that those with hypergraphia have an internal desire to write rather than some outside influence (such as being paid to write). They also write about deep philosophical themes such as faith or love. And interestingly, Ms. Flaherty says that hypergraphics don't have to write that well. Wah-waah! That's too bad. You would think that those experiencing hypergraphia would be visited by the muse, but maybe that's too inclusive. Let's read on. ;)
A famous epileptic writer, Gustav Flabert, felt a "sense of doom" when he went along his day to day activities. However, he started to feel more upbeat during certain intervals and would experience hypergraphia. Other temporal lobe epileptic writers are Pascal, Dante, Lear, and Edgar Allen Poe. I didn't know Edgar Allen Poe was an epileptic writer, but with his dark material, I can see why. I will definitely have to research his experience with epilepsy.
Hypergraphia is also linked to manic-depressive (bi-polar) disorder. Ms. Flaherty admits that temporal lobe epileptics experience milder bouts of depression like manic depressive patients. But look at this! Ms. Flaherty also has information that most writers are manic-depressive. Really? Psychologist Kay Redfield Jamison discovered that writers are ten times more likely to be manic-depressive than the rest of the population and that poets are fourty times more likely! Shocking, no? Ms. Flaherty also describes herself and her own experience with depression. Writers that experience depression deal mostly with Writer's Block says Ms. Flaherty, but they write more once their funk ends. Ms. Flaherty describes a time that she took a mood stabilizer and she didn't want to write. Then she took an anti-depressant which supposedly gave her energy without changing her mood. So she felt stable but she had the energy necessary to write. And she wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. She even spent time in a psychiatric hospital and she underwent a 3 day evaluation before she could leave. During this time, she described herself as a prisoner. This "prisoner syndrome" drove her to write about her experience and that's what she says that writers with manic-depressive disorder and epilepty do to escape their "prison."
So what do you think? What's you reaction to research that writers are ten times more likely to be manic depressive than the rest of the population. Sounds crazy, huh? This is something that I will look into. Overall, I liked Ms. Flaherty's chater. She needed to be a little more clear on the four temporal lobes because it sounds like one temporal lobe is...a temporal lobe. The other have different names, but it sounded unclear in her writing. Again, I love the use of anecdotes to weed out the perceived sciency role of her book. This is information that I haven't been privy of in the past which makes reading this book exciting. Chapter 2 goes more into detail about the temporal lobes and how they work in "normal writers" as opposed to hypergraphic writers. I look forward to seeing what Ms. Flaherty has to say and I can't wait to write another post tomorrow. Alrighty? Take care y'all. :-)
-LaVel
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