Being two years below the legal drinking age and a strict observer of all laws pertaining to the buying and consuming of alcohol, I would never even think of having a drink. Nor would I ever try, in a desperate fit of writer’s block, to use alcohol as an aid to write. Fortunately, I received a letter the other day from a Tulanian who tested the effects of alcohol and writing, and who has a strong opinion on the matter. His story, I repeat, has no resonance with my temperate, law-abiding self — though something about his style seems so familiar…
Dear Sir,
I once fell victim to the myth, believed only by those who have not tried it, that alcohol helps you write. My story begins in high school, when I became obsessed with F. Scott Fitzgerald. It was in my reading of “The Great Gatsby” that I first realized, in a moment of divine inspiration, the beauty of a fine prose style. Nick Carroway’s narration swept me along as no writing ever had. But in due time, I moved on to Fitzgerald’s other novels, short stories, essays and letters, and the object of my idolatry changed from Nick Carroway to the author himself. I wanted to be like Fitzgerald, and I noticed, in his journals and letters, many references to alcoholism, to his favorite drinks, his crippling binges. I attributed this obsession to the importance of alcohol in his work. In truth, it was because he was an alcoholic. He spent 20 years battling his addiction and worried throughout life that he would drink himself to death and did. Of course, I overlooked that. I thought I had discovered the secret to writing. Thankfully, I did not put it to use in high school. I was still weary of alcohol and was so confident in my writing that I felt no need for help. Yet the thought was planted that, if I ever needed to, I could drink my way to literary fame.
Then I went to college and began to write obscure satires in the school newspaper, which nobody, including myself, could make any sense of. I am unsure if a single person outside of my immediate family, whom I forced to do so, made it through any of my articles. Yet the idea that someone could accidentally stumble upon them, by opening the newspaper to the wrong page, or mis-clicking on the website, terrified me. I put more care into my articles, into the arrangement of every paragraph, the syntax of every sentence, than I did to any essay, be it a final paper, for my classes. The quality of my articles may suggest otherwise, but their shortcomings, you can be sure, are not for lack of effort. Such precision cost me sometimes my nights, sometimes my sanity. Too many nights of writing and rewriting, of realizing, two hours before the deadline, that my article was pitiful and then starting over from scratch, compelled me to reach for outside help, which I found, naturally, in the liquor aisle. And on one Friday night, while the rest of Tulane University drank at bars and parties, I sipped my drink at the desk in my dorm room, a blank sheet of paper in front of me.
To write while drunk was exhilarating. The alcohol, and the words, poured out. I seemed to achieve, in every scribbled sentence, the perfection that I never quite captured. At a certain point, my article morphed into the beginning of a novel, the first chapter of which seemed to suggest that, if I kept going, I might complete The Great American Novel by morning. What I ended up reading, groggily, the next day, was no “Moby Dick.” It was astonishingly awful, even by my standards. I realized not only that that alcohol was no trick to writing, but why many think it is.
Alcohol seems, in the moment, to cure writer’s block. It doesn’t. Writer’s block, after all, is inability not just to write but to write well. Alcohol gives you the confidence to write, but not the focus to write well. It changes not the quality but the perception of your prose. It makes it easier to write because every sentence, to the drunken mind, seems flawless. It gives the same illusion, by the way, in regard to conversation. Everyone knows that it is much easier to talk, especially to someone who makes you nervous, while drunk. The same words that sound awkward while sober become fine and proper. The saying that a shy lover just needs “a bit of liquid confidence” refers to this effect. But just because alcohol gives you the confidence to speak, does not mean it will make you speak well. Speeches given out of “liquid confidence,” as anyone knows who has watched one sober, tend to make little to no sense, though the drunken orator thinks he has reached heights of eloquence unmatched since Cicero. The next morning, he will be horrified to hear what he said, as the writer is to read what he wrote. The writer, in fact, will be more ashamed, because, while drunken words are sometimes forgotten in the haze of the night, drunken prose stares back at you, unchanged, the next day.
I wish I could offer an alternative aid for struggling writers, but I have yet to find one. To be a writer is to spend many hours staring at a blank sheet of paper or screen, unable to produce a single sentence. All writers have to deal with this part of the process. One time a friend came to check on James Joyce while he was writing, only to find him slumped over on his writing desk, exhausted. The friend, gathering that his work was vexing him, asked him how many words he had written today. “Seven,” Joyce responded.
“That’s not too bad, at least for you,” said the friend.
“Yes, I suppose it is,” said Joyce, “but I don’t know what order they go in!”
Had I known, when I was looking for a quick fix, that writing was this difficult even for the author of “Ulysses,” I would have been able to accept the long nights, the writing and erasing, the endless revising, without using a substance that only made things worse. Any young writers who are tempted to reach for the bottle should consider the story,
Of your humble servant,
Melvin Boozer