Drinking and Writing

I posted a status update on Facebook yesterday noting I was at The Yardhouse Restaurant, and that “at least they have good beer.” Someone responded asking me if I like to drink (yes, I like certain alcoholic beverages), and I found myself defending the stereotype of the drinking, binging, self-destructive writer. I’ve certainly had my scenes of inebriation, but I am simply lucky not to carry the addiction gene. Beyond that I have an inherent impulse toward beauty—meaning I cannot stand the way I look and feel after any sort of binge. Chocolate, tequila, smoke or deep-fried hush puppies, I don't feel good when I look bad. And I’m OCD about hygiene, so I can’t embody the unwashed, sloppy over-doer (nor can I be an effective hippie, but that’s another blog post).

In one of those universal existential confluences, moments after I posted my “I’m not a tortured, sloshy-drunk, self-mutilating writer” response, I received a friend request from a wonderful writer, Jacqueline Doyle, who has a story in the latest issue of the Santa Fe Literary Review, and read my piece, Demonios Y Canciones Mi Padre (live link to follow) there. In perusing her wall I found this wonderful essay she published in The Writing Disorder that interrogates the notion that writers generally create best when toasted. I found this excerpt apt: “But since I've gotten sober, I've noticed a few things. Not all writers are drunks. My own productivity has increased tremendously. Before I often wrote in an alcoholic euphoria after a night out of drinking, or induced a kind of euphoria sipping wine by my computer, and it sometimes produced results, but there wasn't much follow-through.”

I’ve written about topics that are personally cringe-worthy—and in the creative non-fiction genre (not hidden in the safety of fiction)—so I understand the impulse to use a little juice to obliterate boundaries and feel more fearless, but for me (and Jacqueline, too) it’s never worked. Writing actually IS work, and from my perspective it requires clear, disciplined thinking, analysis and stamina. It requires clarity because when  a writer is not clear (intentionally or otherwise), it translates to the page.  When I read work (and I read multiple stories every day), I can sense a story that is being “sheltered,” “distorted,” or glibly approached with the help of altering substances. The narrative gets muddled, and so does the reader.

My advice to any writers who ask: Approach your work, especially your finished product, with a clear head and analytic brain. If you’re muddled, your story will be, too. If your bravado hides behind fuzziness, your story will feel Cowardly-lion-like (and unreliable), too.

Here’s the crux, as Jacqueline Doyle so elegantly articulates: “In fact many writers lead uneventful lives. Some have even deliberately led uneventful lives in service of their art. Gustave Flaubert's prescription for success as a writer counters the romantic myth so many young writers still cling to. "Soyez réglé dans votre vie et ordinaire comme un bourgeois," Flaubert wrote to Gertrude Tennant in December 1876, "afin d'être violent et original dans vos œuvres." Which translates something like this: "Be regular and ordinary in your life like a bourgeois, so you can be original and violent in your work."

I cannot improve upon that.