“What happens when the impulse to put pen to paper becomes extreme?”

That’s the question posed by a recent piece in the New York Times Book Review: Pregnant With One Child and 295,233 Words

The article, by Molly Young, is about her reading and writing habits during her pregnancy. She managed to write a 295,233 word Google Doc. And her reading included a book called The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain, by Alice Flaherty, which talks about a medical condition known as hypergraphia.

Hypergraphia is the compulsion to write excessively and without obvious purpose or profit. Hypergraphics tend to exhibit flamboyant penmanship and fill every inch of space on a page. They favor colored inks and CAPITAL LETTERS. They write in response to internal rather than external pressures — so, not to achieve tenure or impress girls. And their writing must be coherent. That is, it must rise above sheer orthographic compulsion, must express more than a third grader’s cursive worksheet.

I have to admit that I felt a little shiver of self-recognition in that– and might not we all, those of us who love our notebooks and pens? I’ve often felt like I just want to write and doodle in notebooks without even really needing to, without a purpose other than to fill pages. It’s just because I like to write (and draw)–I like notebooks and pens, and I like the experience of using them. My enjoyment of using them is sometimes out of line with my actual need to use them, or any true creative production.

However, I don’t think most of us would truly qualify as compulsive writers at the level of true hypergraphia. The article says that “Flaherty reserves the label of clinical hypergraphia for those with known or likely temporal lobe abnormalities — the best-understood causes.” Hypergraphia can also be part of a manic episode or other mood disorders. And perhaps this association is why, as the article points out, the most prolific writers like Joyce Carol Oates or John Updike are sometimes looked down upon for spewing out such a high volume.

But perhaps there’s a spectrum of hypergraphia? Is there something in our brains that makes all of us love writing to various degrees, and sometimes too much? If someone did a study of the notebook and pen communities, would they find a neurological thing we all have in common, to varying degrees? I would love to know!