Writer's Block
Mood:
Square
Read/Post Comments (1)
http://snipurl.com/3ft5
WRITER'S BLOCK SIGN OF DEEPER PROBLEMS
from The Boston Globe
The way Ernest Hemingway had a drinking problem and Fyodor Dostoevsky had a gambling problem, Dr. Alice Flaherty, a Harvard neurologist, had a writing problem. During a severe bout of postpartum depression three years ago, she wrote so compulsively that the sight of a blank computer screen gave her a narcotic rush. Worried about damaging her family, Flaherty started taking a psychiatric drug to calm her mood swings -- and found that, although ideas still churned in her brain, she was no longer able to put them on paper. It was an excruciating case of writer's block. Thus begins her exploration of "hypergraphia" -- a term used by doctors to describe the overwhelming desire to write -- and its agonizing opposite.
In her new book, "The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block and the Creative Brain," Flaherty lays out all that neurology has discovered about the artist's brain, from the strange profusion of literary giants with temporal lobe epilepsy to the composer Dmitry Shostakovich's certainty that musical notes radiated from a piece of shrapnel lodged in his brain.
(lots more at site...)
WRITER'S BLOCK SIGN OF DEEPER PROBLEMS
from The Boston Globe
The way Ernest Hemingway had a drinking problem and Fyodor Dostoevsky had a gambling problem, Dr. Alice Flaherty, a Harvard neurologist, had a writing problem. During a severe bout of postpartum depression three years ago, she wrote so compulsively that the sight of a blank computer screen gave her a narcotic rush. Worried about damaging her family, Flaherty started taking a psychiatric drug to calm her mood swings -- and found that, although ideas still churned in her brain, she was no longer able to put them on paper. It was an excruciating case of writer's block. Thus begins her exploration of "hypergraphia" -- a term used by doctors to describe the overwhelming desire to write -- and its agonizing opposite.
In her new book, "The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block and the Creative Brain," Flaherty lays out all that neurology has discovered about the artist's brain, from the strange profusion of literary giants with temporal lobe epilepsy to the composer Dmitry Shostakovich's certainty that musical notes radiated from a piece of shrapnel lodged in his brain.
(lots more at site...)
Read/Post Comments (1)
Previous Entry :: Next Entry
Back to Top
