Hypergraphia: The Compulsive Desire to Write

Hypergraphia is a medical condition in which an individual experiences an intense compulsion to write. A person with hypergraphia will spend hours composing thousands of words on any available surface, using any type of writing implement handy.

Alice Flaherty, a neurologist at the Harvard medical center, recently authored a book titled, The Midnight Disease, in which she explains nearly every aspect of hypergraphia, along with the exact parts of the human brain involved with the condition. In the book Flaherty also discusses her own struggles with hypergraphia - how she lost her twin sons to premature birth and then suffered a severe depression, which she says brought on her hypergraphia. At the height of her depression, Dr. Flaherty said she suddenly felt a burning urge to write and spent hours scribbling pure gibberish for the first few months. Now she has completed three full-length books and is finishing a fourth. Also Dr. Flaherty has said that although her hypergraphia is indeed an "illness," it actually gives her more pleasure than pain.

Throughout literary history, there have been many extremely prolific writers who may have actually had hypergraphia but were unaware of the condition. Anthony Trollope, Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, these were and are very prolific authors, although more than likely none of the ones living today actually have hypergraphia. But there have been a few other authors who wrote so much one might conjecture that they had an abnormal writing condition. Consider Frederick Faust who wrote over 530 books during his lifetime (although many of them were Westerns, he also wrote regular fiction, and averaged over 20 pages of publishable fiction per day). Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer, wrote over 400 books in his life; and Dame Barbara Cartland composed over 700 Romance novels (although some critics say she basically wrote the same book over and over again).

Georges Simenon wrote 136 regular novels and 84 mysteries; and Arthur J. Burks, a legend among pulp writers, wrote over a million and a half publishable words per year - Burks claimed he could compose a story based on any word, person, or object that someone brought to his attention. And on one occasion, some fellow writers decided to test his claim and Burks proved it with ease by writing three excellent stories that could have been published as soon as he typed the last word. Lewis Carrol, author of Alice In Wonderland, and a respectable mathematician, wrote over 98,000 letters during his lifetime.

Speaking of mathematicians, we shouldn't exclude them from this article, should we? Leonard Euler, the brilliant Swiss mathematician, wrote roughly 800 printed pages of mathematical theorems every year. 'Opera Omnia' is an ongoing series of books being published that compile all of Euler's collected mathematical writings. The project began in 1911 and continues to this day, with over 70 volumes of the 'Opera' being completed so far. (Another remarkable fact about Euler is that halfway through his life he went completely blind, which never hindered his output in the least. At one point, before becoming totally blind, but after losing sight in his right eye, he is quoted as saying, "Now I will have less distraction.")

How many of the writers listed above actually had hypergraphia? No one will ever know for sure. But then how does one develop the condition? Is a person simply born with it? People with temporal lobe epilepsy have a higher tendency to develop hypergraphia than other individuals. And people stricken with brain hemorrhages or other types of brain damage can also contract the abnormal writing condition. For example, a British man by the name of Tommy McHugh had two veins unexpectedly burst in his brain one morning; and a short time later he developed an intense desire to scribble poetry, which he did for many months. Only later did his newfound creative desire turn into excessive painting; and now Tommy spends nearly every waking moment creating new paintings and carvings that fill up every space in his home. He painted so much and so often (and still does so to this day), that his wife could not handle the situation and divorced him a few years ago.

Presently, at the Harvard medical school, Dr. Flaherty is studying human creativity and says that she has performed many experiments with light, brain scans, and even magnetic wands, to study the human mind and how it creates. Although she has made progress, the exact mental processes underlying hypergraphia and creativity still remain very much a mystery.

Sources:

The Midnight Disease, Alice W. Flaherty, Houghton Mifflin, Boston, 2004.

Hypergraphia, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hypergraphia

Telling a tale with too many words, Guardian, http://education.guardian.co.uk/higher/research/story/0,,1171596,00.html

The grand dame of romance, BBC News, http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/uk/758113.stm

Leonard Euler, Wikipedia, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Leonhard_Euler