Writers & Alcohol

All writers are weird. In their own way. Edgar Allan Poe was off his face on coke half the time. Stephen King was so whacked out of his mind on drugs and alcohol that he doesn’t even remember writing his 1000 paged novel It. And Byron...well, let’s not go there.

I think – judging on the biased reading I have done – that a lot of writers and poets have suffered from substance abuse. There’s a great article – for some reason I can’t remember the name of it but I think it was written for the Guardian – that is a mini biography of Stephen King and his addiction to alcohol. There’s a wonderful bit where the writer talks about the time Mr. King had just had surgery and the stitches had come off. He sat there, banging away at his keyboard, in a pool of his own blood, and didn’t notice until his wife yelled with fright. King’s response was “yeah, OK, we’ll go to the hospital right after I finish this chapter.” Talk about dedication! Although I’m not a great fan of Stephen King’s novels – the classics: Carrie, The Shining, Salem’s Lot – being my favourite, I have tremendous respect for him as a writer and whenever I read about him always want to write.

(Gotta admit - he's quite creepy looking!)

He, along with other ‘literary horror’ writers – Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palanhniuk, Joe Hill and Irvine Welsh – have inspired me to attempt a second horror story or ‘novel’ due to the length I anticipate it to be. It’s something that demands a lot of research – for my bedroom is full of mountains of books, an empty bottle of wine and an Underwood typewriter (for inspiration, you see) – but something that is daunting all the same. I’m not giving away the plot just yet as it is something I plan to write during my MA – if I get the grades in my degree, of course – but I will say it’s about obsessive love.

Obsessive love and horror – hmm...(I hope you’re all doing this).

I have admit that a great new writer who I love to read and is inspiring is Joe Hill (Stephen King’s son) whose style of writing is simplistic and affective. The opening to his novel Horns gets me every time. 

"Ignatius Martin Perrish spent the night drunk and doing terrible things. He woke the next morning with a headache, put his hands to his temples, and felt something unfamiliar, a pair of knobby pointed protuberances. He was so ill - wet-eyed and weak - he didn't think anything of it at first, was too hungover for thinking or worry. But then he was swaying above the toilet, he glanced at himself in the mirror over the sink and saw he had grown horns while he slept. He lurched in surprise, and for the second time in twelve hours he pissed on his feet."

Even though I’ve read it twice I still want to re-read the book again but the capitulating opening chapter.

I suppose I have strayed away from the title of this blog but that was more of a starting point, more an acknowledgment that a lot of writers are indeed fucked up in the head and perhaps have to get that ‘fucked-up-ness’ out by their writing and their alcohol/drugs. Writers have their own forms of therapy – writing being the main thing, of course – but with writing comes other things: acting out the scenes you write, drinking your own body weight in Vodka, taking enough coke to kill a small horse.

One of my stories that was work-shopped – ‘The Love Season: A Fairy Tale’, about a man who is in love with two women – spawned an interesting conversation about therapy and writers. My lecturer, Catherine Merriman, told us that she read somewhere that some writers have to physically write to understand something. If something bad happens to them they can’t process it in their mind, they have to sit in front of a computer or a typewriter or hold a pen and write it down, whether that be in a journal form or a storyline or anything.

So today I leave you with the thoughts of writers and their ways, the little tweaks that make writers who they are. Now I have a shitload of work to do so I should stop procrastinating and crack on and do it. I suggest you all do the same. For now, we shall part.