I've never been certain what graphomania, or grafomania is, but I think I'll know it when I see it. It has been, I've noticed, a handy description used by the published elites to dismiss the writings of the unpublished or self-published peasants. Nowadays of course everyone is or can be published, not only on blogs but in the form of real books sold on Amazon and even in bookstores, but certainly in electronic form the world over.
I must say that the dismissals of others' writings that I've encountered are usually based on the style of writing and not actually on any discernible mania of the writer. And here's the problem. What style of writing is to be judged graphomaniacal, and what style isn't? That's the question I've never seen answered.
I know one writer who writes maniacally. He is a music industry gadfly who writes daily emails, often several of them, to his subscribers, myself one of them. Somehow or another through a link to one of his newsletters I discovered a new exciting rock group which discovery led me to signing up for subscription.
The man has an opinion on everything in the universe and expresses it in single sentence paragraphs which, if they don't end with exclamation points, they ought to. I would have cancelled the subscription, as I don't read most of his daily e-mails, if not for the fact that he has many followers in the music industry, whose responses he regularly includes, and they are most interesting pieces of historical fact and opinion. So I stay on.
Other than that, if I were to ever publish a book myself, I'd title it "Graphomania" or "of Graphomania", just to stick it in the face of those literary elites always so weary of competition. I am starting yet another blog inspired by yet another diary of a writer that I am reading now, about which more later. My own mania however takes a different form or forms which will perhaps become evident later, has already become evident or will remain a mystery to the reader and to myself. Keep a-readin'!
