The Midnight Disease offers up yet even more fascinating tidbits:

Writer’s block that is linked to anxiety is often also tied to procrastination–the process that leads you to suddenly clean out your basement the week before a writing deadline. Procrastination of a different sort can accompany depression. For at the most fundamental (or simplistic) level, there are perhaps only two types of writer’s block, high energy and low energy. Unlike low-energy block, high-energy block may worsen as your deadline approaches; it makes you sweat, makes you sit down only to jump up again. When your work is part of who you are, and you fear that it is bad, you become more and more frantic. Perhaps you have ideas, but you quickly reject them as worthless. Perhaps you do not even let them into your consciousness, but feel them swelling, purulent–an abscess where your brain used to be. In low-energy block, the desire that makes you sit down to write is a dull sense of guilt. Instead of ideas, you only have sterile ruminations on how things used to be when you could write, when the world had color.

Before this I hadn’t even considered that there could be different types of block. To me, block was block. My block is totally high-energy. I can’t sit still, I get distracted easily. The more energy I have, the harder it is for me to focus.

Although self-diagnosis is often completely inaccurate, I consider myself to be somewhat hypomanic. A brief time spent in therapy during 2001 seems to have confirmed this. My ‘depressions’ are not so much depression in the classical sense, but slumps caused by anxiety or negatively spent excess energy. I can be a little obsessive/compulsive at times, and so most of my writer’s block is the high energy variety.

Fascinating enough, writer’s block is also linked to the frontal lobe of the brain, which, not-so-coincidentally is also responsible for higher order logic and planning. Those with low-energy block (depression) have lessened activity in the frontal lobe. Those with high-energy block, such as myself, are reigned under control by structure, routine and planning.

This perfectly explains my love for structure. It makes me feel safe and calm from my own irrational energies. I know that if I have a good plot, for example, all I need to do is sit back and write. It also highlights the most frustrating part of writing and writer’s block for me–when the ideas and excitement are so high that I’m almost fundamentally incapable of sitting down and getting anything done. This happens a lot actually… and while some might call that a blessing, at times I think it is a curse.

I am more of a hypergraphia kind of person. I can write lengthy blog posts such as this one, rambling forum posts, emails, etc. But when I sit down and stare at my novel, the energy begins to boil in a fury that threatens to choke me.

Solution to a low-energy writer’s block involves getting yourself excited. Arouse yourself–find more energy. Solution to a high-energy block is, ironically, to be less aroused. Lessen the excitement and energy somehow. Maybe I need to take up meditation? Whatever helps me focus I guess…

I’ve learned a lot about myself from The Midnight Disease. Perhaps you could too.

Is your creative block high-energy or low-energy?