Is Writing Addictive?
Or can it save your life?
These are days of resolutions. Plotting, listing. Cutting down, cutting out. Promising to face head-on all those personal demons that we failed to tackle over the past twelve months – indeed, over the course of our entire lives.
Top among New Year’s resolutions are those that target excessive behaviour: drinking, eating, work… The word “addiction” is at home in January as the dreary London weather.
Yet in much of the English-speaking West our relationship to addiction is complicated, to put it mildly. We are quick to label others “addicts” (often a little too quick), while we struggle in our own lives to discern and negotiate the ever-shifting boundaries that separate our own actions. Healthy and normal? Or unhealthy and risky?
Regardless of how we approach these issues, whether we believe that addiction is a powerful concept that can guide us to wellness and perfection or a ploy to sell us expensive advice we don’t need, the language of self-improvement and self-help has permeated all areas of our lives.
Including writing.
In the titular essay of her book Against Memoir, Michelle Tea tells of her life-long compulsion to write stories about her life. Tea likens her craving to write to her experience to being an alcoholic and addict. Indeed, when she was younger these seemed to feed and feed off one another: “For years I sat alone at tables, drunk, writing the story of everything I had ever known or seen,” she writes. “Hypergrafia manifests primarily as personal narrative, memoir. My brain did this to me.”
For Tea, compulsive writing is, like alcoholism, an “affliction”. “We are not unlike alcoholics, and it does seem like so many writers are alcoholics, doesn’t it?” she asks rhetorically. “Writing is a mental illness,” she tells her students. But this equation is complicated by the fact that while at the time of writing the essay Tea no longer drinks, she is still writing.
If I truly see memoir as a compulsion on par with alcoholism – and so similar does it feel, an ecstasy of communion with yourself that facilitates the transcendence of yourself; typing this, right now, I’m hardly even here – if I am powerless over this desire, and if, on occasion, it has rendered my life unmanageable, am I not required to abstain? What would it mean to be sober from writing memoir?
Tea’s ponderings on writing and addiction take inspiration from neurologist Alice Flaherty’s 2004 book The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block and the Creative Brain, which argues that “(c)hanges in the temporal lobes can create hypergraphia” (“the medical term for an overpowering desire to write”). The condition is especially associated with temporal lobe epilepsy (which Dostoevsky might have had). Flaherty makes her arguments based on scientific research, her personal experience of postpartum hypergraphia and case studies of notable writers. For example, she claims that C.S. Lewis became “permanently addicted to reading and writing” as a child after reading a single line from a Longfellow poem.
If online reviews of Midnight Disease are anything to go by, Tea is not the only writer who hears echoes of her own experience in Flahterty’s theory of compulsive personal writing as a kind of pathology. But not everyone is impressed. The psychiatrist Peter Whybrow argues that the idea that certain mental illnesses turn people into artists is simplistic. While some conditions might lead to increased creative output, the quality of the art itself has nothing to do with the condition. Whybrow warns against theories that imply there is a kind of silver lining to serious mental illness in the form of artistic talent. Feminist critics have similarly warned that we risk romanticising serious debilitating depression when we link the literary brilliance of, say, Virginia Woolf or Sylvia Plath to each writer’s eventual suicide.
What is perhaps most interesting about Flaherty’s thesis, and its take-up by Tea and others, is the way it grounds the desire to write in biology – in the human body, including the brain. Writing comes from within, an innate physical and emotional urge. The thesis of writing as something that comes from deep inside each one of us is on full display in the book that epitomises the connection between art, creativity and the language of self-help: Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, first published in 1992. “Remember,” writes Cameron, “there is a creative energy that wants to express itself through you.” For Cameron, art – including writing – is a way to “heal”. Artists are “blocked” or “injured”. The Artist’s Way presents a road to spiritual and creative “recovery”.
The Artist’s Way has proven dramatically popular, selling millions of copies over more than three decades. Many writers and other artists swear by it. If it helps people produce more and better art, it would seem petty to quarrel with its basic premises. Yet, as writers, it behoves us take a critical approach to the language we use, to the ways the words that circulate in our culture shape our understanding of the world. The Artist’s Way is full of talk not only of alcoholism and recovery, but of outdated and simplified claims about how the brain works, the left brain/right brain binary (creative vs. logical) – as if rational thinking were the enemy of art, as if writing were something unique to each one of us, not a system of communication shared among human beings.
According to Stephen Phillips-Horst, The Artist’s Way is part of a “sub-genre of self-help books that combine the comforting yet impenetrable vocabulary of modern therapy with pseudoscientific grand theories on human behavior”. Another thing that holds the books in this sub-genre together is “a persistent worldview that the way forward is not looking outward, but looking in”. Our problems, and the solutions to them, are to be found not in the world around us but in our own histories, bodies, experiences and reactions. “Power”, like “wisdom”, according to Cameron, is something that comes from inside each of us. And so on.
The Artist’s Way borrows heavily from Alcoholics Anonymous and its famous Twelve Steps. While this may appear harmless enough, the appropriation of the language of recovery from a potentially life-threatening condition, and its application to activities such as morning pages and artist’s dates, should give us pause. AA is not for everyone; its insistence on total abstinence has made it controversial in the field of harm reduction. However the “fellowship” is open and honest about its objectives. The main aim of AA is not to unleash members’ inner artists, heal their inner children or help them become better writers. It is to help them stay sober. There is no straightforward relationship between sobriety and writing, just as there is no inherent link between intoxication and great art. The idea of the tortured writer as a wild drunk is, like the fantasy that the best writers are mad, a myth. Conversely, there is no guarantee that abstaining from alcohol and other drugs will make one a better artist.
In a way, The Artist’s Way is the inverse of The Midnight Disease. Whereas the latter addresses writing as affliction, the former offers it up as healing – a way to recover the lost or blocked artist within, to get the creative juices flowing, the films made, the paintings painted, the books written. But these rather grandiose and seemingly disparate interpretations of how writing works reflect the ambiguities of the word “addiction” itself. As Richard J. Rosenthal and Suzanne B. Faris argue, “Contemporary usage of addiction is contradictory and confusing; the term is highly stigmatizing but popularly used to describe almost any strong desire, passion or pursuit.” So in popular parlance we can be addicted to drugs or toxic relationships, but also to cycling or classical music – the former associations imply danger and dysfunction while the latter convey a wholesome lust for life. Bad habits vs. good habits. These conflicting meanings of addiction help to explain our ambivalence towards different desires and behaviours.
It turns out that “addiction” is an auto-antonym: “a word with multiple meanings, one of which is defined as the reverse of one of its other meanings”. Other examples of such words include “to sanction” (both to permit and to punish) and “to screen” (to show or to reveal). Auto-antonyms are also sometimes referred to as Janus words, after the Roman god with two faces, the spirit of doorways and archways.
I get why writers would be attracted to the language of addiction. Writing can feel like an overpowering urge, something we desperately need to get out of us, to tell the world. If we’re in emotional pain, putting our feelings into words can bring solace. When the muse has gone awol and instead we’re visited by the dreaded Block, the frustration can be devastating.
It’s not surprising that we search for metaphors to express these mixed feelings, whether in ancient myth, heroic or tragic tales of famous artists or the dramas of mental illness. The problem comes when writers are so seduced by the language of writing as addiction or recovery that they forsake their writerly capacity for critique, taking the idea as a timeless truth instead of the powerful modern myth that it is.
Pen in Fist is written by me, Carrie Lou Hamilton. You can find my other writing and projects here.
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