The Happenstance Book Habit

When I go to the library, I never have an agenda; I will say, "Oh, I'm just looking," to any dumbfounded clerk who might ask me. I gave up card catalogs when they ceased to be "card catalogs," and they turned into "search databases" that I find hard to navigate due to my psychosomatic, anti-technology stubborness. But something always leads me to the right book. Like a stray dog to a backyard barbecue, I am led by the nose to the shelf of whatever I might need at the time. Example: Right now I'm reading The Midnight Disease, The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain by Alice W. Flaherty. The author is a neurologist at the Massachusetts General Hospital and she teaches at the Harvard Medical School. The book "explores hypergraphia--the overwhelming desire to write--and then the science behind its antithesis, writer's block." It also talks about how mood, the weather, alcohol, etc.,affect one's writing/creativity. I've always been interested in how a writer's brain is different from others, and why so many writers and authors seem to be subject to mental illness.

I took an Abnormal Psychology class in college that noted that many of the most creative people are also bi-polar. For a while, I actually wished that I could become a little less sane so that I could write. "Oh, I'm feeling a bit irrational today," I would say. "Maybe I'll write better."(Perhaps the irrationality, though, stemmed from my waiting until the last minute to write my papers in the first place.) And I usually did write better under the pressure of deadlines, which only perpetuated that manic feeling of habitual procrastination.

All the writers from my American Modernism classes seemed to be suicidal alcoholics--was this a cause or effect of the creative mind? I wondered. I hope this book will answer all of these and questions, and leave me with even more; thus far, my review is "provocative and thoughtful."

And another question from my overly superstitious and suspicious mind, "Does reading books about writing hurt or help one's writing?" We'll see.