Hypergraphia: The Compulsive Desire to Write

Hypergraphia is a medical condition in which an individual experiences an intense compulsion to write. A person with hypergraphia will spend hours composing thousands of words on any available surface, using any type of writing implement handy.

Alice Flaherty, a neurologist at the Harvard medical center, recently authored a book titled, The Midnight Disease, in which she explains nearly every aspect of hypergraphia, along with the exact parts of the human brain involved with the condition. In the book Flaherty also discusses her own struggles with hypergraphia - how she lost her twin sons to premature birth and then suffered a severe depression, which she says brought on her hypergraphia. At the height of her depression, Dr. Flaherty said she suddenly felt a burning urge to write and spent hours scribbling pure gibberish for the first few months. Now she has completed three full-length books and is finishing a fourth. Also Dr. Flaherty has said that although her hypergraphia is indeed an "illness," it actually gives her more pleasure than pain.

Throughout literary history, there have been many extremely prolific writers who may have actually had hypergraphia but were unaware of the condition. Anthony Trollope, Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, John Updike, these were and are very prolific authors, although more than likely none of the ones living today actually have hypergraphia. But there have been a few other authors who wrote so much one might conjecture that they had an abnormal writing condition. Consider Frederick Faust who wrote over 530 books during his lifetime (although many of them were Westerns, he also wrote regular fiction, and averaged over 20 pages of publishable fiction per day). Isaac Asimov, the science fiction writer, wrote over 400 books in his life; and Dame Barbara Cartland composed over 700 Romance novels (although some critics say she basically wrote the same book over and over again).