Does having a drink or two enhance your literary style?

I think it helps mine. I think back on our Dick, who enjoyed a stiff drink or two to relax.

Like people whose jaws come unhinged after a couple and they tell it just as they see it, do we, as authors, benifit of a looser tongue and let the words flow more easily (to be edited later for sure). I imagine most great poetry written under a little influence.

Love,
Betty

It makes me not want to work. When I do write after a couple of drinks, I usually don't like in the morning what I wrote. I stopped drinking a while back for health reasons, and I am more productive now.

I never developed a taste for liquor. Expensive wine would be wasted on me, I couldn't tell it from the cheap stuff.

I have days when I write well and days when I don't. I'm not sure what it's dependent on. I've been reading Bradbury's Martian Chronicles, and he has a foreward in which he talks about his Muse and when it decides to visit. So I guess he has his off days, too.

He paints with words. I don't think I could think up the descriptions he does.

I think the word "drinking" or "having a drink" needs clarification.
I drink wine everyday and don't consider that drinking. It is therapudic. By the same token, I have at least one beer a day and don't consider that drinking. It is healthy.

What I consider drinking is the hard stuff, like whiskey. I see no benefits from the hard stuff except for getting smashed. It can also be used as a pain killer, but there are side effects. Then there is the issue of quantity. If it is not in moderation, then it is drinking.

Alcoholic beverages make me drowsy and I find it difficult to write while sleeping.

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I drink wine everyday and don't consider that drinking. It is therapudic. By the same token, I have at least one beer a day and don't consider that drinking. It is healthy.

Cumulatively, 30 beers a month plus 30 glasses of wine a month sounds like an awful lot to me, but to each their own!

I can't write after drinking.
I am a light weight when it comes to alcohol.
One glass of beer gets me in a silly state then I get sleepy. So I seldom partake of the stuff.
Sometimes I feel like having a glass of wine or beer with food which I will endulge in if I'm not driving.

I never got started drinking. Good thing! If I had I would have had to quit because it doesn't go with my medicine.

Being really honest, what I miss when I'm writing is a cigarette. Wine is a good thing, because it mellows, a martini, every now and then, brightens my outlook, but nicotine would put a wallop of dopamine into my brain's frontal lobes, and I could think more focused and clearly. For a while after I quit, I couldn't write a thing.

Deep breathing helps, but I would really like to find a safe way to get that smoking fix.

Anybody know of one?

Ann

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Deep breathing helps, but I would really like to find a safe way to get that smoking fix.

Anybody know of one?

Chewing tobacco? lol

Ann

You are so right

Nicotine is good for your brain--not only speeds it up, but prevents Parkinson's disease.
I should have smoked.

LC wrote:

Quote :

Deep breathing helps, but I would really like to find a safe way to get that smoking fix.

Anybody know of one?

Chewing tobacco? lol

I'm told my great-grandmother dipped snuff. One of the many drawbacks to that is that you just move the cancers from your lungs to your mouth.

Ann

I have never chewed tobacco. A lot of the old country girls out here carry a spit cup. I could throw up thinking about that, but they tell me that they only chew after they take their teeth out. Sensible, I think.

It took me several years to quit smoking. The thing about smoking is that money is really never the deterent. Dying is.

Once in a while, in my dreams, I am smoking, finding packs of cigaretts all crushed and wet in the rain.

Nicotine addiction is a powerful thing.

I wonder if children of alcoholics have a gene and a propensity toward the easy road of abuse of drugs to cure their discomfort in society.

Looking toward that possibility, I have suffered great pain with no medicinal help.
I am ready to not feel so bad and hurt so much. Doctors never know the real degree of your pain. I imagine, like me, most patient's are reticent to express it for fear it opens the doors to surgical procedures. At my olden age, the idea of the knife on my spine sends chills up it.

I used the nicotine patch until I finally quit smoking. I never knew nicotine prevented Parkinson's.

I would never go back to smoking. It took years to quit. Now I do not suffer about that.

I do eat more chocolate, drink a little more, read a little more, cook a little more,
work a little longer and in other words, I cannot just sit down and stare off into space. My whole body is in motion from waking to sleeping.

My daylight muse hid with the cigaretts.

Now, a couple of drinks opens that small space between the hard reality of day and the imagination to write some words that are not connected to that reality.

What a sad commentary on the power of nicotine.

Love,
Betty

Whatever I was doing, writing or carpentry, having a cigarette was a pause that helped me think before proceeding.
Dick turned to a pipe and had a huge collection of them. Since one does not inhale pipe smoke, the nicotine element is missing, but the pause to think is there.

I've always admired the idea of smoking. It looks so cool

Don't even think about it!

I've read that nicotine is more addictive than heroin. I can attest to the difficulty I had in quitting. It has been ten years now, but there are still times when the desire is there. I will not go back, though. It took several attempts over several years to finally stop.

Ann

through the daytime, instead of using flints for sparks, the goblin just bashed little sugared black coffees against his brain to write, saying "....well it probably shows too, but I swap all this for large mugs of tea in the evening, just that I need more liquid for the same amount of caffeine then, so it's stimulants rather than sedatives that work for me then, just I can't write till my mind is on fire it seems..."

Dear Goblin,
When I was younger, caffine kept me going, and going, and going. To what purpose, I know not. It got me to work on time, kept me awake long enough to watch the eleven o'clock news and be ready to do it all again the next day. I ground my teeth at night.
These days, my heart and brain need a little more sanity. I have unclenched my fists. I gaze out my window and do not try to hurry the birds at their feeders.
I do not shake when I hold my glass.

That is not because I drink vodka like a Russian, it is because I see more clearly than I ever did in my youth. The vodka is part of my evening ritual.
Love,
Betty

"...I always appreciate the written letter form you take in posting betty, it's a very nice approach and original too..." replied the goblin, who couldn't drink anymore, not that he ever drank much in his youth either, just that "didn't" then had become "couldn't" now, though ever so often a glass of dry white wine was inviting, saying "...but that's me, going in the opposite direction to writing, swapping a sharpness of mind for a floating of heart perhaps..."

Dear Goblin,
You make me smile remembering the first letter I ever wrote.

Dear -- --- ---
How are you?
I am fine.

Love,
Betty

alj wrote:

Don't even think about it!

I've read that nicotine is more addictive than heroin. I can attest to the difficulty I had in quitting. It has been ten years now, but there are still times when the desire is there. I will not go back, though. It took several attempts over several years to finally stop.

Ann

Ann, you are so right.
But you know Clint eastwood's the orginal "cigar inspirer"

Eastwood? Maybe, but I think he needs an update:


Ann

Quote :

Dear Goblin,
You make me smile remembering the first letter I ever wrote.

Dear -- --- ---
How are you?
I am fine.

Love,
Betty

"...thanks betty, perhaps everyone remembers vincent van goth for his paintings, though I remember him more for his letters, and perhaps too, where everyone will remember the writers here for their books again, I will just remember them for their posts now..." replied the goblin, smiling "...to think that I am actually conversing with the author each time..."

Dear Goblin,
I have gotten over the famous author thing a long while back. I still put words onto paper, but now it is for the fun of the writing of the words. I read more than I write. I appreciate words as ultimate communication. Even visual grapics leave out the fine details of thoughts. They are a visual splash, only.

I would that I knew words well enough to put a few onto a paper and the reader could see into my brain and know what I was seeing when I wrote, feel the emotion of my brain, and be in the spot that I was.

Love,
Betty

alj wrote:

... would really like to find a safe way to get that smoking fix.

Anybody know of one?

Ann

hi! first comment and already i'm talking about smoking XD. i quit smoking Jan 3rd, but i recently went out to buy a pack of Turkish Royals.. i like to think i can limit myself to just a few cigs a week. I notice that when i get a little nicotine in my brain the desire to write is stronger than usual. but there ARE the health concerns.
Luckily there is a way to get your nicotine while smoking, without the smoke! and no.. it's not a bong , it's called an e-cig. the only thing that i saw that might affect your health in those are the nicotine and the propylene glycol(spelling?) which is used everywhere and we all ingest it in some form of shampoo, toothpaste, soaps, etc.. including medial subscriptions. but it says large quantities at once can be harmful. but then again many things, including water, are harmful in large immediate quantities.

when i can afford it i plan to buy a blu cig blucig.com

welp! time to go cruising the forums again!