Compulsion

I’ve written before about sitting down at my desk faced with a blank A4 piece of paper, pencil and rubber and no idea what to write about. A common enough feeling for writers of all types. But until I started to look up stuff about compulsion I had never heard of the opposite of this concern.

Hypergraphia is a behavioural condition characterized by the intense desire to write or draw. Hypergraphia is not mere journaling, nor is it the careful crafting of prose. It is a flood, a torrent, a demand from the brain to put words to paper without pause. The writer may fill pages upon pages, notebooks upon notebooks, barely stopping to eat or sleep. The compulsion is not always cathartic; sometimes, it is simply uncontrollable.

Alice W. Flaherty

Alice W. Flaherty, a neurologist and author of 'The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain ', describes it as a condition driven by abnormal activity in the temporal lobe, often seen in epilepsy, mania, or intense grief.

The above was taken from an article in Psychology Today written by S. Fenella Das Gupta Ph.D., MFT. She goes on to explain that:

Hypergraphia exists on a spectrum. At one end, it is a deep, reflective practice, allowing words to give shape to emotions through a rhythmic pulse. For some, grief is turned into poetry, essays, and even books, giving purpose to their pain. In this way, hypergraphia becomes a bridge, not just for the writer, but for others who have suffered in silence. On the other, it is an overwhelming force, entangled with mental health struggles such as bipolar disorder, severe anxiety, and sometimes psychosis.

The article discusses the underlying problems in some depth and I don’t feel able to précis this enough to do the subject justice.

I would like to continue by looking at how Hypergraphia has affected people. For instance:

Hypergraphia was one of the central issues in the 1999 trial of Alvin Ridley for the imprisonment and murder of his wife Virginia Ridley who had died in bed of apparent suffocation and who had remained secluded in her home for 27 years in the small town of Ringgold, Georgia, United States. Her 10,000-page journal provided evidence that she had remained housebound of her own will and was instrumental in the acquittal of her husband.

Isaac Asimov

Isaac Asimov famously said "The only thing about myself that I consider to be severe enough to warrant psychoanalytic treatment is my compulsion to write ... That means that my idea of a pleasant time is to go up to my attic, sit at my electric typewriter (as I am doing right now), and bang away, watching the words take shape like magic before my eyes." He wrote or edited more than 500 books and an estimated 90,000 letters and postcards.

Other artistic figures reported to have been affected by hypergraphia include Fyodor Dostoevsky and Robert Burns. 'Alice in Wonderland ' author Lewis Carroll is also said to have had the condition having written more than 98,000 letters in various formats throughout his life. Some were written backward, in rebus, and in patterns, as with "The Mouse's Tale" in Alice.

Eleanor Alice Burford, whose pen-names included Jean Plaidy, Victoria Holt, Philippa Carr, Eleanor Burford, Elbur Ford, Kathleen Kellow, Anna Percival, and Ellalice Tate, described herself as a compulsive writer. Naomi Mitchison wrote over 90 books of historical and science fiction, travel writing and autobiography, has been described as a compulsive writer.

Compulsion

my Oxford English
defines the word as
an irresistible urge
to behave in a certain way

but what I need is
a word to describe
resistible urges
that I hardly ever resist

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.