I am drinking writer, and I would like to weigh in. I have by the way been published a few times and am always writing and sending stuff out and I am wrapping up another novel and I often drink while writing. An earlier poster made a good point when he/she said that sculptors and painters cannot drink so much because of the demands of eye-hand co-ordination, and the same could be said for dancers and musicians. Writing is a kind of journey of the mind that occurs at the typer, or the keyboard, where you just sit and work away and a glass of scotch nearby comes in sips between paragraphs. I mean, you can physically manage that. It loosens inhibations of quotidian life and lets you open up more easily. It relaxes you. If the writing envronment is right, you can do anything. It is, at the least, a satisfying way to waste a life, writing of against and for it (life, I mean). Yes, I am drunk now.
I cannot say if writers drink more than other people. Probably a lot of non-writers drink a lot without writing. None of my neighbors write. But they may well drink. I don’t pry into their lives. But caught in this net of drinking sorts are famous writers, already cited in the article. And many writers don’t drink at all. Stephen King, I hear, has made billions of dollars post-alcohol. Good for him.
Drinking and writing both entail ritualistic behaviors. If it is your ritual to pour a highball at dawn to continue where you left off, there is no stopping you. You are a freight train and even a good woman can’t stop you and that’s why you don’t have a good woman in your life anymore. Then you reach The End and polish, polish, polish like Spinoza with his lenses over and over until you stamp The End on it for reals, take a breath, and painfully recover and quit drinking, start road-work and the gym and settle down for a while, feel better until the next one.
A lot of writers drink, and die of heart attacks and suicide, too.
