With every tick, the clock on the wall is reminding you of how long you’ve been staring at the blank pages in front of you. There are no other distractions around you other than the beat of your own heart and the nerve-wracking awareness that you might be wasting your time. How can you be certain that whatever you’ll fill this blank space with will be somewhat valuable, or at least editable? How can you be sure that in about an hour, the workings in your brain will have catalysed some sort of thought-process that led you to put your ideas into comprehensible words seconds later? We’re playing the Russian Roulette of writing: you don’t know what’s about to hit you and whether it will be good or bad, but it’s important that you remain confident. It can be hard sometimes to find that inner voice that believes you have the ability to sound like you’re making sense while simultaneously pushing the limits of our own creativity. You’ve got to find the friend inside you that this voice belongs to and invite him to watch over your work when necessary. Perhaps the only way to achieve that is by inviting him over for a drink - and it better be an alcoholic one.
Having a drink or more while writing has been a prevalent habit in the history of literature. Numerous authors such as Charles Bukowski, Dorothy Parker and (maybe the most notorious alcoholics of them all) Ernest Hemingway were all known for holding a drink in their hand while holding a pen in the other. Why is it that some of the most famous masterpieces in literature have been written by alcoholics? And why is there still some poetic attitude towards being intoxicated while writing? Is there a legitimate link between alcoholism and creativity, and if not only being part of some placebo effect, what exactly is that connection about? Most of us have experienced what the consumption of alcohol can temporarily do to our bodies and our minds, but I doubt that any of us have created anything productive in that condition. It seems too absurd that absinth might have helped Ernest Hemingway give birth to one of his most famous books called “Death in the Afternoon”, which was also the name of his contribution to a cocktail book in 1935. The man sure loved his alcohol enough to create his own cocktail and name it after what could’ve even been the product of his addiction.
In a way there is something slightly romantic about the writer who smokes his cigarette in solitude, unbothered by the world around him, while swivelling a glass of whiskey in his hand. It’s a harmonious image of a person who is completely comfortable being left alone with his own thoughts, exploring the ongoings of his own mind. But under the disguise of a self-sufficient, self-fulfilling character who enjoys his own company we can easily find a man who’s his own enemy and the self-critic that takes away all the courage that would otherwise enable him to put his creativity towards something productive and worthwhile. Writing can feel a bit like you’re at war against yourself and your own mind, and you know that if you can’t make sense of it all, how is any other reader going to do that for you? When in company of some sort of intoxicant, the journey suddenly feels a little less lonely. Booze can ease our mind and take some of the pressure away that comes from having to create something out of thin air. It relaxes us and makes us feel a little bit more confident in our ability to fill a page with ideas that won’t just make sense to our drunken selves. Of course, there is the editing the day after, but we don’t have to think about that right now. We’re too busy connecting all these dots in our head that we hadn’t thought of before. Aligning them into correct order is a task for the organised sober, not the creative drunk, right?
Besides the poetic aspect of being accompanied by alcohol while writing, there exist some actual studies that have researched into the connection between intoxication and creativity. One popular belief claims that just like insanity and sleep, alcohol use can spark creativity because of its effect on a cognitive system called the “working memory”. In short, our working memory is responsible for temporarily holding information available for processing, while blocking out extraneous information. This enables us to focus on one problem at a time, and is therefore a crucial part of our decision-making and everyday behaviour. When alcohol comes into the picture, we struggle to focus on one thing alone and therefore tend to bring up information that might at first seem unrelated to our original thought, but is therefore also exactly what makes us think outside the box. Studies have for example shown that drunk people were more likely to solve creative problems and were even more time efficient in doing so than their sober contestants. Whether this is evidence enough to prove that alcohol can in fact be beneficial to us in problem-solving or creative tasks is hard to tell, especially because of the limited amount of accomplishments that have arisen from alcoholism.
On the flip side of alcohol induced creativity, there’s also been a number of autobiographies written about writer’s recovery from alcoholism. Even if it did help them cope with the pressure of writing, far too many became dependent on their liquor to even start writing in the first place - a dependency that was, whether they wanted to admit it or not, an addiction to an intoxicant that shortened the lives of some of the most brilliant minds of literary history. Both Hemingway and Bukowski claimed that some liquor could help to alter one’s mindset, which is necessary for boosting creativity. Hemingway also saw alcohol as a “mechanical relief to the mechanical oppression that is modern life”, but then again, he died at the age of 61, Fitzgerald died at 44, Edgar Allan Poe at 40, whereas others might have reached their 70s but likely died of alcoholism anyway. So as much as alcohol can be a great companion, a creativity and confidence booster, it should be used carefully just like every other mind-altering drug. What’s worth mentioning is also that other studies have shown links between alcoholism, manic-depression and boosted creativity, Fitzgerald being an example as it’s presumed that he suffered from the condition. It turns out that it might not be alcohol alone that helps you cure that writer’s block that tends to creep up on you at times where it’s hard to find the playfulness and light-heartedness necessary to write. Fitzgerald might have called alcohol “writer’s vice”, but perhaps it’s safer to limit oneself to the innocent and less harmful practice of sweating through those ideas and words alone, with no one’s help other than that of your own sober mind.
