Brad's Reader Blog Sample Post
Do you suffer from hypergraphia?
Most people know about writer's block, a condition where one cannot squeeze a word out of their pen or keyboard if their life depended on it. But the pendulum also swings the other way. There's a little discussed ailment called hypergraphia – the obsessive urge to write.
When I say "obsessive urge to write" I'm not talking about someone who writes for a few hours a day because it's his/her job, or even a person who has lots of good ideas buzzing around. No, I'm talking about someone whose compulsion to write is so great, that the person cannot control it and they cross the line from just being "creative" to having a real mental disorder.
I first heard about hypergraphia in a philosophy class I was taking and we got sidetracked discussing an upcoming essay that was due. Many of us in the class tended to write longer essays than what was required (it was an upper-level class)and the professor wondered if any of us suffered from this strange disease.
Unlike writer's block, hypergraphia doesn't get a lot of attention. In fact, outside of academia, I don't think I have ever heard or seen it being discussed. So when I began doing some research on the web about this affliction, I was happy when I came upon an article written in Psychology Today that discussed hypergraphia in a straightforward way so even non-science minds like mine can understand it. According to the article, this strange illness is nothing new:
Tales of writers possessed by the muse on steroids date back to the first-century Roman poet Juvenal, who wrote about "the incurable writing disease." But it wasn't until the 20th century that scientists explored the brain chemistry behind this lust for language. In the 1970s, neurologists discovered that hypergraphia was often triggered by temporal lobe epilepsy.
The article continues:
Evidence now points to an abnormal interaction between the temporal and frontal lobes of the brain in hypergraphia. Activity in the temporal lobe is reduced, spurring activity in the frontal, the area that potentiates complex behavior like speech. A writer's inner critic goes quiet, and the ideas flow. What comes out might not be brilliant, or even make sense, but it provides fodder for future editing.
Yes, there are much worse things to suffer from. The general consensus appears to be that hypergraphia is not a particularly debilitating disease (I use the word "disease" with caution here). Only if the constant writing starts to interfere with other obligations does it become a problem.
As the article points out, one of the marked signs of hypergraphia is the turning off of the inner editor. This means that just about anyone can simulate such a condition by free writing. This means you sit down and just write anything that comes to mind with no worry about quality or even if the writing makes sense. That's what editing is for.
I'm going to dedicate a few posts this week (I'm not sure exactly how many) to the issue of becoming a more prolific writer. One does not need to have hypergraphia to be productive. All to easily we let the little details of life (work, family, eating, sleep) get in the way of writing, causing our literary ambitions to take a back seat. Tomorrow's post will be exploring how to strike that balance between writing and life.