Chasing The Muse
Since 1987

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

by Alice W. Flaherty

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The Midnight Disease

by Alice W. Flaherty

reviewed by C. Michael Becker

Thanks to Wendy Teller, I read Dr. [Neurologist] Alice W. Flaherty's magnificent book The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block and the Creative Brain. The "midnight disease," an expression she attributes to Poe, is an excessive drive to write or "hypergraphia."

Dr. Flaherty experienced a "disruption" in her writing capability/attitude during a serious post-partum depression. "Post-partum depression" is a term she herself uses, but since she was trying to work through a major depressive episode associated with the deaths of her twin daughters almost immediately after delivery, I think it was something much more complicated. Her physician's training in observation, as applied to herself, became the springboard for this volume [307 pages, including endnote references and index]. Some readers may find the clinical and physical descriptions/discussions of the brain as an organ [the "creative brain" thread] a little much, but it is neither so heavy nor so pervasive that one cannot just Fast Forward over it if that suits you. I hung on every word and illustration.

I particularly recommend the chapter titled "Metaphor, the Inner Voice and the Muse" in which Dr. Flaherty explores "the muse" as both a creative and a psychic concept: the "outside voice that writers blame or attribute in the same manner as psychotics who hear voices." She notes that psychologists believe metaphorical thinking -- realizing similarities between disparate objects -- is the basis of creativity in both the artistic and scientific disciplines. Metaphor is the creative bridge between reason (categorization and inference) and imagination (the novel leap from one object to another).

The concept of a muse accounts for the sense that creative ideas can be foreign to, can surprise and baffle even their creator. Dr. Flaherty quotes T. S. Eliot: "If the word inspiration is to have any meaning, it must mean [that the writer] is uttering something which he does not wholly understand -- of which he may even misinterpret when the inspiration has departed from him."

Any work on creativity must define inspiration. This subtext of definitions in The Midnight Disease is every bit as worthwhile to serious writers as is considering the source of creativity. Dr. Flaherty proposes that creativity must be a combination of novelty and value: novelty because known solutions are not "creative" even if they are useful and "valuable" because a work that is not useful or illuminating to at least some members of the population is merely odd, not creative.

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C. Michael Becker was born in Chicago, Illinois, and has been a resident of Naperville since 1982. He received the Master of Arts in English Literature from Northwestern University before devoting thirty years to a career in employee benefits. He retired to concentrate on freelance and creative writing and photography. His essays, short stories, poetry and photography have appeared in the Naperville Writers' Group Rivulets and Rockford Writers' Guild Review, the Online Journal of the Dana Literary Society as well as Chicago area newspapers. His collection of poetry and photography, The Dead Letter Office, was published in July 2006. He is currently writing a novel.