I gather that you are a freshman here, eager for an upperclassman’s counsel. However, just at the moment, I have drinking to do.

News flash: Great writers often partake of the sauce:

Prudent writers learn to take more out of drink than it takes out of them. Kingsley Amis, in a 1975 interview, prescribed a glass of Scotch as an “artistic icebreaker.” John Mortimer told the New York Times that an early morning flute of Champagne “sets my brain racing.” A roommate of Tennessee Williams reported that the playwright rose early and set his typewriter clacking, after fortifying himself with a martini, a bottle of red wine and a somewhat incongruous pot of coffee.

. . . The writer’s life is solitary, but not the drinking writer’s. In his 1975 memoir, “Here at the New Yorker,” Brendan Gill portrays the magazine (where he worked for 40 years) as a society of first-class bingers. One colleague believed that vomiting was, like shaving and showering, a natural part of any morning routine. Edmund Wilson drank at lunch until he couldn’t stand; A.J. Liebling once fled a burning restaurant but not without securing his bottle of brandy; Wolcott Gibbs lugged buckets of premixed martinis to the beach and stored them in the sand.

Not surprisingly, the article neglects to discuss the literary merits of drunk-blogging, of which the greatest example in human history can be found here (Link fixed. Apologies to Roy…)

Among my numerous failings in life, I’d probably count my inability to drink and work at the same time. Even when sober, I take far too long to actually finish a sentence — these two alone have taken me about ten minutes — and booze usually just extends the process. Once in grad school, a well-timed happy hour allowed me to plow through an episode of writer’s block, but that was an exception to the rule. Another time, a colleague tried to persuade me over Chinese food that crystal meth would actually do wonders for my dissertation; it seemed to be working for him, so I asked what his work schedule looked like. He explained that he could write for three or four days in a row before crashing for “five days, maybe a week.” To nearly everyone’s surprise, that guy eventually finished.