No. I’m actually not talking about the name of a Depeche
Mode album. I’m talking about the lubrication we artists and creative types
often require before diving off the deep end. That device of loosening up the
gears comes in a variety of flavors, but you might know them as drugs and
alcohol.
Modern pharmacological advancements have not caught up to
the demands of the muse, the requirements creatives have for a substance to
safely guide us from the chatter of mediocrity, away from the distractions
of social media, from the pulls of adult life and its trappings of repetition
that slow the heart, and dull the very core of the mind.
We still rely on the poisons, for lack of a better term,
that wreck upon the shore of the body, and with an army of bedazzled pirates
with nothing better to do than to rape and pillage, the body declines to a vast
washup of useless sand, devoid of life, and dead from the possibility of future
life.
If only it were easier to get that muse to wake up without
indulging, for don’t we all know of countless stories of artists succumbing to
the very thing that perhaps kept them going at all. It’s an ironic predicament.
But this all has to be taken in with that little ol’ proverbial grain of salt.
Artists that adhere to the straight-edge approach, or only moderately indulge
in some offbeat substance, don’t sell magazines or newspapers. We aren’t a
culture that finds interest in the middle ground. We like extreme everything.
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| Hunter S Thompson. Boy, did he like the "poison." |
It also should be noted that the “poison” really lies in the
eye of the beholder. In some cultures, drinking anything is strictly prohibited
and can lead to some extreme reaction, where in others no one blinks an eye at
finishing a bottle of wine in one night.
My poison? I’ve sampled in the past from the tray of
options, but I’m a moderate. Currently, I consume two bottles of red wine over
the course of four nights. (Keep in mind when contemplating my body’s reaction
to alcohol, I weigh 120 lbs and am female). I used to consume way more, some
eight years of nightly red wine drinking to the tune of three full glasses a
night, a habit started while living in Spain. I don’t like other types of
alcohol, or wines with white or pink colors. Red is it, and red is all.
But as a creator with varied interests, I find some outlets
require the straight edge approach, and others absolutely need alcohol to get
things flowing, sometimes forcing me to break my two bottle a week rule. I’m currently finishing up a first draft of a
novel, while also working on two new screenplays. One requires the “lube,” the
other shuns it. Can you guess which one falls into favor of dear old Bacchus? If
you guessed novel writing, big gold star for you!
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| Marguerite Duras in France, c1955. Photograph: Robert Doisneau/Gett |
The novel writing process these past few months has been so
intense, growing more intense as the word count has gone up. It could be the
desolate cold setting of the story, and its dark tone, piled on to the fact I’m
writing it in the dead of winter in a house by myself (when I don’t have a cat
in my lap.) Sometimes, getting the wine buzz going has been the only way to push
forward, to open up the tap to unusual word combinations, to take risks and
fully slide into that dark cold world and witness my characters do horrible
things to each other. Trying to do this sober has been wrought with tension,
with frustrated tears at times, or I’ll walk away from the work, welcoming a
distraction from the reason I carved out an hour or two in my day to write at
all.
Strangely, while working on screenplays, the alcohol does not
help one bit. If I start drinking and working on a screenplay, I soon can’t
make the connections from something starting on page 10 to something happening
on page 67. I am not able to think big picture anymore, or think about
characters arcs, tying up loose ends, and I get stuck in the minutiae. I don’t
drink when I’m working in pre-production for films or screenplays. But something about
making that first draft of a novel appear just requires it.
How many writers go to the bottle? I am sure we can all name
more than one without even typing “writers that were alcoholics” in Google.
(Here is a really fascinating piece in The Guardian on women writers and alcohol.) What is it about writing novels that makes drink so attractive? For me, it has
a lot to do with the maddening process of novel writing. It’s largely a solo
activity until one is ready to start workshopping, hunting an agent, etc. Being such social creatures, there is something just a little unnatural to shun human contact in the name of art, to listen to the maddening hum of the inner critic, and stare at the sharp downward slope of the empty page. While
many can write with lots of human activity going on, like in a coffee shop, I
cannot craft prose while people are gabbing away at the table next to me and
the barista is calling out the third time for James to come pick up his double latte with soymilk. I require isolation, usually listening to dark ambient drone music
(Soma FM Drone Zone is my go-to), and then the two glasses of wine. An hour and
a half later, I’ve coughed out 1000 words, my daily goal on workdays, and I
brush my teeth and go to bed, my brain usually still working on the novel until I finally sleep.
Well, certainly those 1000 words must be crap, you might
think, coming from the place of booze. Actually, they aren’t. The stuff that
comes out is usually daring, the pacing and rhythm of the language
defined, and with some slight reworking, ends up becoming something I really like. I’m also not a blundering drunk when I drink wine, pushing over my pencil
cup, kicking my cats and tripping on my own feet. My head is just nice and
warm, and novel-land is not such a scary place to be.
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| Oh, Oscar Wilde. Loved the absinthe. |
So until the research “ducks” are all in line on booze and
health, I’ll keep pulling forth that sadistic muse with my cabs and malbecs, as
I listen to her guide my stubby little fingers over the keypad. Sorry
screenplay muse, only herbal teas for you.
