The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain (review)

Writers tend to have an ambivalent relationship with their own psyches. On the one hand, they secretly worship the sources of inspiration, which they believe to lie halfway between the inner child and some cruel repression. On the other hand, they want to know as little about them as possible, for fear that knowledge will trivialize the Muse, and silence her voice. This is a reluctance that came in focus for me years ago, when in the course of a study of creativity I contacted a few hundred eminent individuals and asked to interview them about the way they went about their work. While scientists readily agreed, many artists, and writers in particular, were less eager to discuss their working practices.

Saul Bellow's secretary, for instance, replied to a request to interview his employer: "Mr. Bellow informed me that he remains creative, at least in part, because he does not allow himself to be the object of other people's 'studies.' In any event, he is gone for the summer." In a similar vein, Norman Mailer wrote: "I am sorry but I never agree to be interviewed on the process of work," and he added cryptically: "Heisenberg's principle of indeterminacy applies." Such answers, typical of writers, were never given by busy scientists, even those of Nobel Prize stature. Scientists trust their lab equipment rather than a fickle Muse, and therefore are less worried about revealing—first and foremost, to themselves—how they go about their business.

Given this situation, what will writers make of Alice W. Flaherty's The Midnight Disease? I would wager many of them will be drawn to it by fascination mixed with foreboding. What havoc might be wrought to their treasured imaginations by this book from a neurologist teaching at Harvard and Massachusetts General, a book that in its subtitle promises to enlighten the reader about "The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain"? Could too much knowledge be a hindrance in this case? In my opinion this is not a trivial question. Understanding the mechanics of the creative process—especially in domains of creativity that depend so heavily on mental play with symbols, rather than on the manipulation of external reality—could easily demystify it to the point at which the writer may say, why bother?

Novelists and poets often draw their inspiration from events or ideas that are quite trite or mundane. Their genius resides precisely in their ability to distil commonplace human experiences into moving, memorable ones. Robertson Davies spent years writing a three-volume series of novels triggered by a single event he witnessed as a child, when one of his schoolmates packed a snowball around a rock and injured a friend with it. The focused belief that such a tiny seed could germinate into hundreds of captivating pages is difficult to sustain. Who am I trying to kid? Why would anyone want to read about this boring stuff? Even protected by a mystical belief in being called to translate for the Muse, it is difficult not to wilt when confronted with such questions. When a writer's mind is teetering in doubt, it is not likely that information about the entwined strands of mental disease and creative writing will help the writer to persevere.

So too much information about the mechanics of the brain might have an inhibiting effect on the mind. But science must march on, even if in so doing it helps dry up the wellsprings of imagination. And if knowledge must be dispensed, Flaherty is better at imparting its potential poison than most. She rarely succumbs to the temptation to pathologize creativity, even as she rehearses the list of creative writers who suffered from manic depression or when she describes how the interest in language, the obsession with writing, and the sensitivity to one's moods can all be traced to parts of the brain that...