The Creative Writer's Survival Guide: Advice from an Unrepentant Novelist

The Writer’s Vices

231 The Writer’s Vices . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . I’m no saint. I spent years drinking more than I should have.When I was a student at Iowa, I was arrested one night for public intoxication . I was photographed, fingerprinted, and thrown in jail. That was over twenty-​ two years ago. I continued drinking heavily for a number of years, until, eventually, I put a lid on it. I’ll still drink a few times a year, mostly at writing conferences, but even there I’m scaling back. The last thing I want to do is sound like the clichéd reformed alcoholicwho ’s going to preach sobriety. But here’s the deal.When I think back on all those years that I drank heavily, I wasn’t writing a whole hell of a lot, and I wasn’t getting much published. It’s probably not a coincidence that my output as well as my publication rate increased exponentially when I cut back on drinking. Furthermore, I realized that many of my short stories and one failed novel were set in bars, and my characters were almost always in some altered state. This was fine for a story or two, but it grows stale pretty fast. Occasionally, I’ll get a student in my class who fancies him- or herself (usually himself) a writer but is actually drawn more toward the image of being a writer, and more often than not, that image resembles Charles Bukowski or some other writer who’s more famous for his alcohol intake than his prose. This student sees this image of the writer as romantic, and isn’t that what being a writer is all about, anyway? Hanging out in smoky bars? Chatting up the barkeep? Bourbon with a beer chaser next to a pack of cigarettes, matches, and a handful of loose change? All you need to do is read the section “C.V.” in Stephen King’s book On Writing to see how distinctly unglamorous it is to be an alcoholic and drug addict. He writes of the day his wife, Tabitha, organized an intervention, with family members and friends present: “Tabby began by dumping a trashbag full of stuff from my office out on the rug: beercans, cigarette butts, cocaine in gram bottles and cocaine in plastic Baggies, coke spoons caked with snot and blood, Valium, Xanax, bottles of Robitussin cough syrup and NyQuil cold medicine, even a bottle of mouthwash.” For further evidence of how ugly this sort of life can get, read Blake Bailey’s biographies of Richard Yates and John Cheever to watch in excruciating detail how alcoholism 232 The Writer’s Life wreaks havoc on everything and everyone within the alcoholic’s orbit. The rule of thumb is that you get better as a writer the older you become, but in nearly every instance that I can think of, the writer who’s known for his legendary drinking wrote his or her best books early on. The later books are almost always pale comparisons, as in Richard Yates’ case, or embarrassments, as in Frederick Exley’s. Not long ago, I tried giving a reading after drinking on an empty stomach and taking medication. Not surprisingly, the reading was a disaster . Later, I jokingly compared my performance to Elvis’s last few concerts, where he was drugged and bloated, sang only a few songs, and then read lyrics from a sheet of paper before calling it quits for the night . . . but we all know the end of Elvis’s story, and it’s not a pretty one. ...