The Midnight Disease

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

By Alice Weaver Flaherty
(Mariner Books, Paperback, 9780618485413, 320pp.)

Publication Date: January 2005

Other Editions of This Title: Hardcover

Categories: Composition & Creative Writing - General

Buy online from an indie bookstore
Find an indie bookstore near you

Link to this Book


Description

Why is it that some writers struggle for months to come up with the perfect sentence or phrase while others, hunched over a keyboard deep into the night, seem unable to stop writing? In The Midnight Disease, neurologist Alice W. Flaherty explores the mysteries of literary creativity: the drive to write, what sparks it, and what extinguishes it. She draws on intriguing examples from medical case studies and from the lives of writers, from Franz Kafka to Anne Lamott, from Sylvia Plath to Stephen King. Flaherty, who herself has grappled with episodes of compulsive writing and block, also offers a compelling personal account of her own experiences with these conditions.




About the Author

A. W. Flaherty is a neurologist at Massachusetts General Hospital who also teaches at Harvard Medical School. She is the author of The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain. A. W. lives with her husband and twin daughters near Boston.

Indie Bookstore Finder

Indie Bestsellers

1Q84
Haruki Murakami
Knopf
The Marriage Plot
Jeffrey Eugenides
Farrar, Straus, and Giroux
The Sense of an Ending
Julian Barnes
Knopf
Death Comes to Pemberley
PD James
Knopf

Make Your Own Wishlist






Update Profile