So last night I went to the Philoctetes Center here in New York for a roundtable on Hypergraphia and Hypographia, two terms that I had never before heard in my entire life.
Hypergraphia is the unstoppable drive to put words on paper or any other available surface. Basically, the people who have this write non-stop. They'll write on anything, napkins, match book covers, menus. We have a writer in our chapter who has something similar. She even brought in poems that she's written on napkins. People with this affliction, if you can call it that, will write even around the edges of what they've written to get it all down. It's almost like a verbal diarrhea. It's associated with temporal lobe changes like epilepsy and mania. Apparently Vincent van Gogh and Doestoevsky suffered from it, which makes sense when you consider that van Gogh didn't pick up a paint brush until he was 30 and then painted like a fiend until he committed suicide.
It sounds like a great disorder to have doesn't it? Unfortunately, it can be almost painful. I know that I have a hard time writing as fast as my mind is racing, so I can't imagine what it must be like for them.
Hypographia is basically writer's block, which most of us have experienced at one time or another. Of course, no one knows why some people suffer writer's block and some people don't. It can come from experiencing a trauma in your life, that prevents you from sitting down and writing, or it can come from not being able to turn off that internal editor in your head, that constantly tells you that what you are writing is crap.
I personally have suffered from intense writer's block, particularly when my father died. I couldn't write for almost seven months because the grief was just so intense. There was just no way to write my way out of it. I just had to feel it and hope that I would come out the other end in one piece. I was literally hanging onto my sanity by my nails. There were days that I could barely make it out of bed to go to work, all I wanted to do was just crawl into a hole and pull it in after me. Seriously, I thought I was going to lose my mind.
I had lost my mother when I was 24, and I guess I didn't allow myself to really grieve then. I just threw myself into acting and stage managing. So in a sense, I was allowing myself to feel the grief that I had bottled up for 11 years and that combined with my grief over my father just pulled me into the muck.
The internal infernal editor is my other problem. I've managed to turn that off to a certain extent but only by allowing myself to get the first draft out on paper before I edit. If I write a chapter and then edit, I get bogged down in thinking that it's the most horrible thing I've ever written. I really admire writers who can take a month just to write a chapter or a sentence. I was talking to cutie pie author after the roundtable and he was telling me that he's lucky if he writes a chapter in a month, and I'm thinking wow, I once wrote a book in a month. I'm not saying it was a good book, but I wrote it. Jonathan Lethem was talking last night about how he loves going over the sentence structure and playing with the words. The Queen Bee, who's workshop I was in for two years, took five years to write her third novel.
My concern has always been about the story, and the emotions. I probably spend more time trying to get the reader into my character's heads and what they're feeling. I suppose if I wrote literary fiction, I would probably write slower, but I don't. I write genre fiction and I write pretty fast. Not Meg Cabot/Nora Roberts fast, but I could easily write two books a year. As it is, I try to write everyday, even if it's just this blog.
And I never have a problem with finding ideas. My brain teems with plots and characters, some of which will probably never see the light of day unless I'm planning on living to be 150!
The discussion at times got a bit estoteric and eggheady but most of it was informative. This graphic artist gave his solution for writer's block. He told an audience member who stated that her problem was her internal critic, that she should just write the worst film ever, direct it badly, cast really bad actors, edit it badly and then show it to her friends, and then her worst fears would be realized and then she could move on!
Sounds a bit extreme but I see where he was going with the idea.
Anyone suffer from writer's block? And what did you do to get past it?
EKM
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