Sunday, February 01, 2004

The Midnight Disease

Came across this from reading a post on Roland Tanglao's blog about neurologist Alice Flaherty's book titled The Midnight Disease. It discusses hypergraphia -- the burning need to write -- and writer's block. Interestingly, she says in her press release interview with her publisher:

"As for examples of writer's block, the strange thing is how paradoxically eloquent many writers are in describing their block. Because a block is often very genre-specific, as anyone knows who has felt blocked on a big paper and has procrastinated by writing long e-mails. Coleridge is a perfect example of that — he used to churn out metaphysical treatises when what he really wanted to do was write poetry. The recent movie Adaptation demonstrates a trick many writers use in that situation, which is to escape your block by writing about it. Both Coleridge and Wordsworth did that."

I *wish* I suffered from hypergraphia, and not from writer's block. It took me f**ing forever to get that first assignment done!! I pulled 3 nearly-all-nighters just to get it completed, when it really should've taken just one.