Unsolicited Advice for New Writers from Someone Unqualified to Give It, Volume 17 - Up your Nose with a Rubber Hose

Take this post with a grain of salt:  I've got a double Glenmorangie on the rocks on one side of me, a bottle of happy no-sleep pills within arms reach, and the odor of a weekend's worth of cigarette smoke seeping out of my pores.  I'm not without my chemical...well, not chemical dependencies, but let's call them chemical affinities.

I like booze and uppers, but I really, really hope that's not what I get remembered for, unlike this recent photo feature from Life magazine, which seems to be what some people really want to hold on to.

I've blogged before about the hazards of alcohol for a writer, and now I'm going to just roll up the ol' sleeves and say a word or two about the other intoxicating options available to a writer.

First let me say I'm not some big druggie.  I've had my fun (and actually borrowed fun from some other people who weren't going to use it themselves), but aside from a pretty regular routine of getting falling-down drunk, I don't have any sort of intoxicant "lifestyle." I can speak from experience, but I can't work this story from every possible angle that merits attention because I've constrained my own experience with moderation, common sense, and a healthy fear of prison rape. 

Furthermore, while Hunter S. Thompson can say things like "I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence or  insanity to anyone, but they've always worked for me," he is a now-deceased literary super-persona, the last and best-known of the late beats, and an untouchable super-celebrity, I'm just some asshole from Detroit with a blog.  If I go around telling people to do drugs, it's probably some sort of crime or something.

I don't know - this country sucks.

But I will say I'm really tired of this idea that all creative people are somehow stoned or high or drunk all the time.  It irks me on par with someone who witnesses an incredible work of creativity and responds with "Who, dude, you have WAAAAAAYYYYYYYYYYY too much free time."

Fuck you and your hackneyed humor right in the ass.

In truth, I've found coffee, cigarettes, and an occasional rush of amphetamine (usually legal at that) to be about what a writer should take while he's writing.  Cocaine has that interesting liminal situation wherein it's a party drug, yes, but also a drug that keeps you awake and alert for hours, even if it does turn you into a loud-talking, self-absorbed asshole.   Booze makes you clumsy and slow, E is a party drug better suited for making EVERYONE YOUR BEST FRIEND EVER! Mushrooms are an experience best left unmediated, and weed is, to me, a complete waste of time.

And that's why I hate being associated with stoners and druggies because I'm a writer: the idea that at the same time while I'm pounding away at the keyboard, revising my narrative, reinventing my characters, and generally putting myself through existential hell, these idiots think I'm sitting on the couch playing Goldeneye for six hours, eating an entire case of microwave burritos and listening to fucking Bob Marley. 

I'm not anti-drug by any stretch of the imagination.  I think it's something that should be done in moderation, and with a great deal of care as it is of course completely illegal. I'm sure you can get a good book out of going to jail, but personally I'd rather just stick with scotch and hope they make mini-thins legal again. 

But law or no law, I've not seen anything really good come out of drug use, at least creatively speaking.  I mean, I see a lot of good stuff coming out around the use - art inspired by a mushroom dream, music coming from inside someone's pot-headed hippy coma, but I see a tremendous energy needed for the production, an energy and a focus that drugs can really strip away.

The cultural consensus seems to be that druggies make art, when it's the other way around for anyone whose work has come to matter.  The work comes first, and always comes first, and then maybe drugs can serve as recreation.  I know I like to celebrate the completion of a good chapter or story with a scotch or two, but if someone wanted to get high or trip, I think that's their business.

But this idea of getting high and suddenly becoming creative is one I grappled with through high school.  Back then I mostly wanted to play guitar, which was unfortunate because I stink at it.  No passion, no patience - but I stuck with it for years out of some misguided sense of obligation, like somehow that would make me a more authentic person, being a musician.

So I smoked a lot of dope and tried to play the guitar.  The results were unspectacular, and the illusion that drugs and creativity go hand-in-hand was shattered forever.

H.R. Geiger said in a brief bio that one sign of real mastery is to be able to use the artists tools as an extension of self so that creation is still possible in altered states, like under the influence of drugs.  That's good advice NOT because it is an endorsement of drug use, but because it is advice to any artist (writers, this means you!) to get a handle on your medium first, and then get high.

It's one of my more ardent desires that people will stop glamorizing the connection between creativity, drugs, and alcohol.  I may prefer the company of drinkers myself, but that sure as hell doesn't mean that I think they're better artists.  Plenty of teetotalers make great art, write great books, and make fine music, without so much as a sip, a puff, or a spike.

Writers, do what you can to get this stupid idea out of people's heads.  If drugs were the key to creativity, everyone could be creative.  If creativity always lead to drugs, we'd all be druggies.  There is no link.

As Cory Doctorow once said, "The plural of anecdote is not fact."