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I just read The Midnight Disease by Alice W. Flaherty, which spends some time discussing compulsive writing and speaking and how they might be give us insights into writer's block. This thread, though, is not about what the book mentioned, it's about what the book left out: reticence, communication avoidance or aversion, avoidant personality disorder, and social anxiety.
I'd like to modify the last few sentences a bit. While reticent individuals may view themselves as incompetent communicators, people with writer's block are more likely to view themselves as being boring communicators or having noting of importance to say or having nothing to say that other people want to read.
Ms. Flaherty writes about her own experiences with hypergraphia and depression; my own brush with mental illness went in the direction of social and communication avoidance instead. In college, living on a nearly-deserted college campus in summer and becoming increasingly distressed by the knowledge that I was failing a Latin class I needed for graduation, I was overcome by the compulsion to hide in my room. I dreaded speaking to anyone, and unplugged my phone because I feared people would call me.
I slowly recovered from this over the next year or two, including returning to the same campus for another summer intensive language class, in spanish this time. I suffered from anxiety throughout the class but ended up getting an A in it and graduating, an accomplishment that helped abate my anxiety. After a few more years I also stopped having nightmares about school. But, my personality was permanently altered by that year of college; since that point I've been more averse to speaking, more aware of my silences, more aware that other people are not particularly enthusiastic or appreciative when I do open my mouth.
I see this issue from the other side too - most story ideas are not for stories I would be interested in reading. It's completely logical that most people would be disinterested in reading anything I have to write. Conversely, if they aren't interested in my thoughts, I have no motivation to value them as an audience or desire to communicate with them. When I do write, I write slowly and often have to tell myself it doesn't matter if I think of exactly the right word or grammatical construction, nothing is really accomplished by spending 2 hours pondering over it. I have a perpetual fear of criticism, ironically moderated by my knowledge that most people don't care what I say or how I say it, and most of them aren't worth me caring about their opinions.
Unfortunately I haven't run across any information about how avoidance and reticence are expressed in altered brain chemicals or activity, as Midnight Disease describes for the disorders associated with hypergraphia and pressured speech. But it certainly seems to me than an aversion to communicating like I've observed in myself is the true opposite of the urge to communicate to a mass audience via publishing fiction.
So, I guess I've finally gotten to the philosophical question which was the reason I thought this was the most appropriate forum for this thread. The question is pretty simple: why write fiction? I'm relatively happy with my story ideas just floating around in my head, so why should I put myself through the agonies of nailing them down on paper? Given the statistical fact that most people have no interest in seeing the average story idea developed and published, why does anyone want to create novels and send them out into the world? And one more, given that readers of fiction rarely communicate any of their thoughts about particular pieces back to the writer, isn't writing fiction a totally disfunctional way of trying to communicate to people?
I'd like to modify the last few sentences a bit. While reticent individuals may view themselves as incompetent communicators, people with writer's block are more likely to view themselves as being boring communicators or having noting of importance to say or having nothing to say that other people want to read.
Ms. Flaherty writes about her own experiences with hypergraphia and depression; my own brush with mental illness went in the direction of social and communication avoidance instead. In college, living on a nearly-deserted college campus in summer and becoming increasingly distressed by the knowledge that I was failing a Latin class I needed for graduation, I was overcome by the compulsion to hide in my room. I dreaded speaking to anyone, and unplugged my phone because I feared people would call me.
I slowly recovered from this over the next year or two, including returning to the same campus for another summer intensive language class, in spanish this time. I suffered from anxiety throughout the class but ended up getting an A in it and graduating, an accomplishment that helped abate my anxiety. After a few more years I also stopped having nightmares about school. But, my personality was permanently altered by that year of college; since that point I've been more averse to speaking, more aware of my silences, more aware that other people are not particularly enthusiastic or appreciative when I do open my mouth.
I see this issue from the other side too - most story ideas are not for stories I would be interested in reading. It's completely logical that most people would be disinterested in reading anything I have to write. Conversely, if they aren't interested in my thoughts, I have no motivation to value them as an audience or desire to communicate with them. When I do write, I write slowly and often have to tell myself it doesn't matter if I think of exactly the right word or grammatical construction, nothing is really accomplished by spending 2 hours pondering over it. I have a perpetual fear of criticism, ironically moderated by my knowledge that most people don't care what I say or how I say it, and most of them aren't worth me caring about their opinions.
Unfortunately I haven't run across any information about how avoidance and reticence are expressed in altered brain chemicals or activity, as Midnight Disease describes for the disorders associated with hypergraphia and pressured speech. But it certainly seems to me than an aversion to communicating like I've observed in myself is the true opposite of the urge to communicate to a mass audience via publishing fiction.
So, I guess I've finally gotten to the philosophical question which was the reason I thought this was the most appropriate forum for this thread. The question is pretty simple: why write fiction? I'm relatively happy with my story ideas just floating around in my head, so why should I put myself through the agonies of nailing them down on paper? Given the statistical fact that most people have no interest in seeing the average story idea developed and published, why does anyone want to create novels and send them out into the world? And one more, given that readers of fiction rarely communicate any of their thoughts about particular pieces back to the writer, isn't writing fiction a totally disfunctional way of trying to communicate to people?
I'm not sure it really applies to writing fiction but, it's an awesome story.
