Studio8 - Uniting the Arts

The Midnight Disease…The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain

by Alice Flaherty

I'm thoroughly going to enjoy this. Just started it a few days ago ... still haven't read much. Maybe I can finally find out what happened to my brain so I can jumpstart it back into its obsessive creative mode. Man, I miss that.

From the intro -

On good days, ideas would wake me at four in the morning , tendrils of words coiling around me like some heady perrume. It was as if a door had opened onto a hot wind from the tropics, the sort of wind that propels ships carrying peacock feathers and rubies and apes and incense. On bad days, the words were like a charnel house through which I had to search for the bodies of people I loved.

and

When the world went dead, words lost their meaning; there was no pressure to write. I was not really a blocked writer, I was no longer a writer at all. It was peaceful – unless I tried to speak or write. Then it was as if my lungs were full of water, suffocating.

oh man do i know this feeling.... and that's just from page 12!

How is it going? Seems like I start a thousand books and maybe finish reading one.

I like this bit a lot.

On good days, ideas would wake me at four in the morning; tendrils of words coiling around me like some heady perfume. It was as if a door had opened onto a hot wind from the tropics, the sort of wind that propels ships carrying peacock feathers and rubies and apes and incense. On bad days, the words were like a charnel house through which I had to search for the bodies of people I loved.

For some reason it reminded me of this

Beware thoughts that come in the night. They aren’t turned properly; they come in askew free of sense and restriction from the most remote of sources.

Blue Highways William Least Heat Moon

This is how I felt for the month I stopped posting. It was like a vacation but then I got stoned again and I am back to the typing compulsion again.

When the world went dead, words lost their meaning; there was no pressure to write. I was not really a blocked writer, I was no longer a writer at all. It was peaceful – unless I tried to speak or write. Then it was as if my lungs were full of water, suffocating.

Except I was not suffocating, and the world came alive. I felt free from this compulsion. I think that is why I love my motor cycle so much, something I enjoy with out getting stoned. If I ever get to a point where I enjoy writing without getting stoned, then I think I really will be a writer.