Hypergraphia: On Prolific Writers and the Persistent Need to Produce

≠≠Up every morning promptly at 7, briefly enjoying breakfast around 8, consistently at his desk no later than 9, and then doggedly writing for five hours until no less than two-thousand words were put onto paper—by this schedule, Charles Dickens was able to produce David Copperfield, though the vagaries of serialized publication stretched out the book’s appearance over the course of 1849 into 1850. “I never thought, when I used to read books, what work it was to write them,” muses the titular character in Dickens’ most autobiographical novel, “As to the writing, it has its own charms.” The various rooms where Dickens wrote, from Kent to the capital, have been reverentially preserved in house museums dedicated to him.

At the Charles Dickens Museum in London, you can view his red mahogany secretary desk, along with his stolid captain’s chair, arrayed on a heavy green rug decorated with a geometrical pattern, the arrangement sitting perpendicular to the side window, which is framed in heavy red drapes, the better for the writer not to be distracted by what was going on outside.

What if, however, without disparaging either those who write a lot or those who write a little, we consider that for the former the approach to the craft which is grubby can also be glowing?

One can imagine the author crouched over his desk’s inclined blotter paper, occasionally opening one of its myriad drawers with their decorative carvings to remove another sheet, the only sound the scratching of the pen as the sun’s rising light filters through the window. An anchorite’s cell, a monastic cave, an inner sanctum, but for Dickens who was professional, competent, workmanlike, it was something even more important—an office. That desk and chair moved with his career, from the white-plastered home in Kent where he wrote David Copperfield to London where he wrote A Tale of Two Cities in 1859, and in that same city where Great Expectations was published only a year later.

The rate of Dickens’ prodigious output—two canonical novels across twelve months—conveys the essence of his craft. “I never could have done what I have done,” says David Copperfield (also a writer), “without the habits of punctuality, order, and diligence, without the determination to concentrate myself on one object.” This steadfastly held schedule would result in fifteen novels, five novellas, and hundreds of essays, short stories, and lectures—a little under five million published words during Dickens’ career.

Despite Dickens’ canonical reputation, the author of door-stoppers such as Oliver Twist and Nicholas Nickeleby, the stench of the entrepreneurial still hangs about him. Even more than a century later you’ll hear people ascribe his labyrinthine sentences to editors’ supposed propensity to pay-by-the-word. By such estimations, Dickens appears motivated more by serial deadline than by the divine—in other words a worker.  

Boz’s work, and the response to it, embodies the duality of the prolific writer, a type of author simultaneously admired and underestimated. For every prolific writer that is lauded for not just their output but the quality of their prose, a Margaret Atwood (18 novels, 18 poetry collections, 11 books of nonfiction, nine short-story collections, and two graphic novels), Joyce Carol Oates (63 novels, 47 short-story collections, along with plays, essays, and children’s books), or even Stephen King (65 novels, etc.) who has only recently been given the critical respect that he deserves, there are those understandably dismissed as schlocky purveyors of a collective write-by-numbers process like Dean Koontz (over a hundred novels), Danielle Steele (over two hundred), or James Patterson (some 285).

This is before we consider the genuine extremes of pulp writers like L. Ron Hubbard with over a thousand books or the Spanish romance novelist Corin Tellado who wrote over four thousand. As easy as it might be to mock a Koontz or a Patterson, it’s harder to do so with Dickens, for in Boz’s example there is the possibility that his writing was inspired, even mystical, in part because it was work. With Dickens, you encounter the possibility that the muse need not be waited for, but that she can be compelled. 

Prolific writers are simultaneously envied and dismissed, admired and snarked about. There is the sense that a writer can write too much, that whatever results can’t be very good. Note the 2015 article from the British Medical Journal entitled “Are prolific authors too much of a good thing?” Culturally, there is a cache given to meagre output, to the concentrated, intense, patient process of a Harper Lee (two novels), J.D. Salinger (one published novel, some short stories), or Emily Brontë (one Wuthering Heights). But there is no correlation between a short CV equaling genius and a long one its opposite, nor the contrary. Brontë and Oates are both brilliant writers, despite the difference in how much dedicated shelving they fill, and while Hubbard’s prose might not recommend itself, there are many one-hit wonders who’d have better left that novel on their hard drive. As basic as it sounds, there are both good and terrible prolific writers and good and terrible unproductive ones. 

What I’d posit it that being prolific is about something else, that once we eliminate from the list those who maintain a factory of production with multiple assistants and remember those who actually penned myriad titles themselves, whether Agatha Christie (66 novels, 150 short stories, and 25 plays), the Belgian mystery writer Georges Simenon (400 novels and 21 memoirs), or the mainstay of science fiction and everything else Isaac Asimov (over 500 books), that we need to consider the exigencies of prolificness. 

Because prolific writers so often are methodical writers, like Philip Roth (thirty novels) who told Tina Brown at The Daily Beast that “I work most days and if you work most days and you get at least a page done a day, then at the end of the year you have 365” or John Updike (23 novels, 18 short story collections, 12 nonfiction books, 12 books of poetry) who rented an office above an Ipswich, Massachusetts restaurant where he kept regular working hours, there can be a sense that the magic has been wrung out of the process. After all, William Pritchard said of Updike, “He must have had an unpublished thought, but you couldn’t tell it.”

Often there is a valorization of the tortured writer, all those sad, young literary men at the bar (only very occasionally and in-between sighs) scribbling in moleskins while they smoke American Spirits, whereas someone renting an office might as well be an accountant. Then there is the suspicion that at its most extreme, prolificness isn’t even an issue of work, but of mania—more stunt than literature. What if, however, without disparaging either those who write a lot or those who write a little, we consider that for the former the approach to the craft which is grubby can also be glowing? That there is, in fact, a mysticism engrained within the stolid, that the compulsion to produce isn’t inconsistent with inspiration, but an extension of it?   

Far from a perfect writer, as the comments section occasionally attests to, I am a prolific one (16 books, six collections, hundreds of essays). Anecdotally, I’ve noticed that the questions I receive at readings can focus on output as much as content, and I’d be lying if I claimed that there isn’t a bit of pride in that, but also an anxiety that there is an unspoken assumption that such writing churns more than it flows. There is also, naturally, the issue of advice, though I don’t have any opinions on snazzy strategies like the Pomodoro method or using a Freewrite Traveler.

If anything, I’ve suspected that such gambits as those train people that they need perfect circumstances to write (oh to be Dickens in his sunlight solitary repose!) whereas I’ve found that embracing imperfection, since its opposite rarely arrives, to be far more conducive. As a stay-at-home primary parent of young children, I learned how to write with a sleeping baby strapped to me; as somebody whose spent many hours sitting on city buses or subways, I’ve perfected texting cryptic writing notes to myself or constructing mnemonics to remember what I’ve composed. 

What I think those who have hypergraphia share is a prioritization of the process over the product, of the experience of writing as much as its conclusion.

Often, I’ve told people that what worked best was to become a recovering alcoholic with moderation issues whereby I may have traded one addiction for another, but at least after a marathon 5,000 word writing session, I rarely wake up in a pile of garbage covered in my own vomit. But more than anything, the answer is something else—it’s that I write because I absolutely have to write. Something in my constitution necessitates it, and while that doesn’t make me a better (or worse) writer in and of itself, it’s the essential element that has made me a prolific one.

George Orwell rather infamously claimed that “Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout with some painful illness,” but I’ve never found it that way myself. The reality is that I’m very fortunate to have been published and I’m grateful to have readers, but if neither was the case, I’d still be writing. That’s because I’ve always understood writing as the prescription to existence, as a way of organizing my understanding about the world; indeed for me composition is equivalent to thought, for often it feels like I haven’t really read something (or certainly comprehended it) until I’ve written about it, that perhaps my experience of the world must be mediated through the word processor. 

At its most extreme, psychologists speak of “hypergraphia,” where writers cover receipts and paper bags in spidery script or maintain 100,000-page personal diaries. There is beauty to such madness. “The scientist asks how I can call my writing vocation and not addiction,” observes neurologist and hypergraph Alice Flaherty in The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer’s Block, and the Creative Brain, though “I no longer see why I should have to make that distinction. I am addicted to breathing in the same way. I write because when I don’t, it is suffocating. I write because something much larger than myself comes into me that suffuses the page, the world, with meaning.”

Similarly, when Oates was asked by Robert Phillips of The Paris Review if she was guilty of “producing too much,” and how her output could be squared with the sometimes-imperfect circumstances for writing itself, she answered that “One must be pitiless about this matter of ‘mood.’ In a sense, the writing will create the mood. If art is, as I believe it to be, a genuinely transcendental function—a means by which we rise out of the limited, parochial states of mind—then it should not matter very much what states of mind or emotion we are in.”

What I think those who have hypergraphia share is a prioritization of the process over the product, of the experience of writing as much as its conclusion. For us, writing is a means of being. As regards the hypsographic, for us “writing” is always more verb than noun. In our strange era of artificial intelligence, with “writing” now rendered by the press of a button, the hypergraph’s lonely position can seem all the more counterintuitive, but thus all the more human as well.

John Milton (and I am no Milton, though, then again, most aren’t) would compose the immaculate verse of Paradise Lost in his head at night, requiring an amanuensis to transcribe the blind poet’s verse upon waking. Of this type of labor, done not on deadline or for bottom line, Marx described Milton as having produced poetry “like a silkworm produces silk”—because the writer had to. When observing a silkworm, it could be said that the spinning of the web can be as beautiful as the web itself, that the work itself is the thing.