“You don’t know what it is to stay a whole day with your head in your hands trying to squeeze your unfortunate brain so as to find a word.”   Gustauve Flaubert

There is a story I heard way back in a class in graduate school.

James Joyce was talking to a friend and lamenting about his writer’s block.  He said he had been writing for days and felt empty of words, saying to his friend, “All of this time I sit at my desk and nothing comes. For the past two days I have only been able to write seven words.”

His friend, of course being supportive, said, “But James, seven words is most certainly better than no words at all.”

To which Joyce replied, “Yes, but I cannot decide in what order to write them,”

What’s the Connection Between Brain Fitness and Writing?

After reading an article yesterday in Copyblogger, by Melissa Kamaze of Mindful Construct, I began thinking about the connection between the brain, the body and writing, in particular writer’s block. I came across the story of Alice Flaherty who happened to be a neuroscientist. Flaherty, after tragically losing premature twin boys, began to write and could not stop writing for nearly four months.  She was driven to write even when she would rather have not. Her prolific writing has had some success; she has published four books.

Hypergraphia is the fancy name for the possibly pathological drive to produce media, writing or other.  When you think of the sometimes mythical driven artist – Van Gogh comes to mind – who is unable to stop producing, who will go without sleep, food, sex, all the norman human drives to continue at their craft, that is hypergraphia.

Using that definition, I would say writer’s block might then be called agraphia, an aversion to producing. So, how does this happen?

When artists are at their best, they often defer their talent to a muse of some sort.  Well, Flaherty has been looking for the muse inside the brain.  The creative process is a balance between that which is novel or unusual and value.  Some could write forever and do little better than the monkeys who eventually will type out Shakespeare on their typewriters (an old story).  Lots of novelty, not much value. There has to be a modicum of skill to begin with.

The Creative Circuit in Your Brain

Creativity in writing also requires a balance of cooperation from the committee in your brain. The limbic system, the place where emotion originates, provides the passion and drive needed to plow forward.   That emotional part has to communicate with the language center in the temporal lobe (Scratch the left side of your head behind your ear and you are pretty close) and both have to hook up withto the part of the brain where sense is made of all of these, the frontal lobe of the neocortex.  When this balance is just right, the production of meaningful writing flows from the brain to the hands and on to the paper (or screen, take your pick).  When they are out of balance, we end up with either gibberish, or possibly, nothing at all.

One idea that surprised me is that when a person is seen as uber-creative, it may  be due to a advantageous brain disorder.  So all of us that sit here from day to day, pecking away at our keyboards, or with pen in hand, are beneffitting from being slightly sick.

The unstoppable drive to write (or produce in other media), called hypergraphia, can be triggered by temporal lobe epilepsy, mania, and other mood disorders. Dostoevsky and van Gogh are examples. The late Norman Geschwind, a Harvard expert on hypergraphia, referred to such talents as a valuable result from a brain defect. Harvard Gazette

The unfortunate other side of that is that when we have writer’s block, like our friend Joyce, we are actually experiencing mental health.

So What?

So, if your goal is to remain creative, it could be that, along with Melissa’s six steps and taking care of your brain physically, the way to do it is the same way you get to Carnegie Hall – practice, practice, practice. That’s what turns on the lights on the myelin highway.

The other side of that coin? When you do get stuck, give yourself a little breathing room.  Maybe you need one of those car alarms on your laptop or pen that says -

“Please Step Away From Your Work”

Here’s to hanging on to our best brain defect!

photo credit: Jonno Witts