Back when I was a full time editor, which included a lot of writing, I found a drink or two before bed stopped the narrative, allowing me to get to sleep instead of writing all night and then being useless at my job the next day. Mind you, this was in the 90s, when HR brought the drinks trolley down to the big conference room every Friday at 3pm, and the boss usually took us all out for drinks at 5 to keep the party going. Fun times, but not necessarily productive.
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I have thought a great deal about why my writing career is such a trainwreck, but I will admit that the explanation “You’re just not getting shitfaced drunk often enough” had never occurred to me.
Brb, jush conducting a lil exshperiment …
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I’m not sure that writers drink more than other artists- certainly musicians seem to use all sorts of substances.
And certainly not more than people in other jobs.
But they do get to have a larger audience for their pontificating on it.
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If anyone is interested in a deep dive on this topic, I recommend the book Last Call by Daniel Okrent. It’s a fascinating look at how America went all the way to constitutional amendment to try and solve a social problem that wasn’t really very serious anyway (although more serious than people today are generally aware). Imagine trying to do anything with a constitutional amendment today and you can see why this story is so interesting.
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Anyone see the movie, Trumbo? That was one three-way street of booze, speed, and bathtub.
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Trumbo had nothing on Mank when it came to alcohol-fueled yet Oscar worthy screenwriting.
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I need to see Mank.
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I don’t know what the stats are so I could be off but the hours plus the intensity plus the stress of perfectionism and not measuring up to one’s own standards= a lot of unwinding with alcohol.
Or as one wag put it at a gig “I don’t drink at work, because then when am I not drinking?”
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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.
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One of the more memorable lines from that film:
“Don’t worry, folks. The white wine came up with the fish!”
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Another reason why people drank alcohol was that it was safer than water. There wasn’t much sanitation couple of hundred years ago and if you wanted to avoid dysentery or worse, you drank wine or cider, not water.
Michael Pollan wrote about this in Botany of Desire with his recounting of Johnny Appleseed.
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I’ve heard that before as an apocryphal tale, but I’ve never actually seen it sourced by historians. It seems to be one of those things that “everyone knew” that wasn’t true.
Here’s an ask historians thread where they go over it again after having gone over it many other times.
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Except that Drunken Fist is an actual style of Kung Fu that goes back centuries (perhaps to the Song Dynasty 100 years ago) and requires an insane amount of training. What Chan was doing was tribute.
We need better … chemistry. Alcohol is a straight up damn sledgehammer. It’s brutal on the body.
Wanting to take the edge off is natural. It’s human. What’s sad is that the one legal (almost?) everywhere tool we have for doing this is… 7 thousand years old so it’s good that it is well and truly tested and all… but also still very much like banging on your head with a hammer. 
(This is also why I’m glad THC is being legalized so many places. Thank god. And having used THC (it’s legal here), it’s not even that interesting a drug and certainly not worthy of the demonization it got. If you compare the massive trauma to society caused by Alcohol and replaced all that with THC… my god, we could have saved so many people. So many!)
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But bone
Yes, he was portraying an actual folk hero, who was known for Hung Ga, but the plot was an invention. While there’s several existing drunken man and drunken monkey forms and styles, but none of them (publically) purport that their kung fu improves while drunk.
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And for anyone interested in more of a shallow paddle, I’d recommend this Oversimplified video:
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I mean, the rest of the world hasn’t had it and many modern countries have a healthier relationship to alcohol than the US.
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Why some drinkers write
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Interesting thread- thanks for sharing! I was also under the impression that the story was apocryphal but had not seen it explained in detail. If nothing else, the story always sat wrong because if you go far enough back to where the water was dangerous, you get to pre-germ theory anyway and people didn’t know water could be dangerous. If you go further back than that, water wasn’t dangerous. Or you get to a period where people suspected water, but only a few people in some parts of some cities were affected so there would not have been wide-scale behaviour change. Water was only bad in cities and most people lived rurally until recently. I’ve seen people apply this story to all different periods of history and it never adds up if you dig into it even a little bit.
It’s also one of those ”just so” types of story that people love, and those are never true. 
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