A Writer's Brain

I wrote the first draft of my first mystery in six weeks. When I tell people that, they are shocked and envious. But here's the rub: I'd spent the previous several years working on another writing and research project, a project I could not finish because medical issues got in the way. All that time, while I couldn't write, couldn't even really read, I suspect my brain was busy working on the murder mystery. I just wasn't physically able to write anything down, or even vocalize it, until I got all the weird electricity in my head under control.

I am an epileptic. Or, in modern, politically correct language, I have a seizure disorder. This puts me--at least according to epilepsy.com--in great literary company. Unlike Dostoevsky or Dickens, however, I've never had any desire to inflict my disorder on one of my characters. No one reading my fiction, at least to this point, would diagnose me as an epileptic writer.

Epilepsy is a pain in the tush. I probably had my first seizures in my teens, but they were "absence" seizures, "partial" seizures or dizzy spells, nothing that presented in a fashion recognizable to my friends and family. I didn't have my first grand mal seizure (or, again with the more politically correct label, "tonic-clonic seizure") until college. The first drug they put me on--Dilantin--I was massively allergic to. I have no recollection of the three weeks before they discovered the allergy but for brief flashes, most of which involve doctors.

But then they put me on another drug, Tegretol, which worked fabulously for fifteen years. Until it slowly began to fail, which caused the medical problems that prevented me from finishing my dissertation. In 2005, I went on Lamictal. That's when I wrote my academic mystery. Followed, in the space of about eighteen months, by a rough draft of my second academic mystery, and a first, second, and final draft of the beading mystery that eventually found a home with an agent. The rough drafts of each book took progressively longer. I believe that's because by the time I got to the beading mystery, I'd run out of all the stuff that had built up while the Tegretol was failing.

Then came the hives. Six months consumed with trying to find their source didn't leave a lot of time or physical or mental energy for writing. Eventually, they figured out that the Lamictal had caused the hives, and I had to go off of it. Then they put me on Keppra. Once the hives went away, I could write again, though not nearly at the level I'd been working at while functionally medicated.

In a couple of weeks I have to go get my brain recalibrated. I go into the hospital for five days, they hook me up to electrodes and videotape me while I sit around doing nothing. This is because the brain noise is now too loud for me to write, too loud even to allow me to read more than a few sentences at a time. It has taken me hours to write this post--a far cry from a whole mystery in six weeks!

So when I read about Tolstoy, and Carroll, and Dante being epileptics, I wonder whether they would have been as prolific, and whether they'd have written such interesting things, if they'd lived in the era of EEGs, anti-convulsants, and videotaped hospital stays. Maybe I'd be a better writer if I stopped taking medications for a while and went off somewhere where all the walls were padded and I couldn't hurt myself if I had a seizure.

Or maybe I'd just be out of my mind with boredom, and unable to write at all.