The Bad Habit That Was Standing Between Me and My Best Writing Life

If crisp air and the scent of pumpkin spice invigorates you, you’re not alone. Many people have decided to reset their goals in October instead of January. The trend’s called October Theory.

Last October, in the spirit of change, I quit drinking alcohol. An unexpected benefit was the positive effect it had on my writing productivity. Since this time last year, I published one novel and wrote two more. I also finished one non-fiction book and have a draft on another.  Finally, I started this newsletter.

Before I made the change, I was lucky to finish one novel a year. Read the story of how it came together.  

Is Alcohol Standing Between You and Your Best Writing Life?

 The worst thing to happen to me while I was drinking was falling backwards down a staircase. As I was helplessly bumping down each stair, I wondered what the consequences would be. Broken bones? Severed spine? Cerebral hemorrhage?

Lucky for me, I only suffered bruises and embarrassment, the latter because I was at a party, and everybody witnessed my tipsy pratfall.

Did I stop drinking after that? Never crossed my mind. Even though the experts would classify me as a heavy drinker (between two and three glasses of wine daily and more on weekends), I was also highly functioning. No one had ever said to me, “Your drinking is a problem.’

After my fall, I’d learned to better game alcohol by drinking fizzy water between every glass of wine, so I never really got too drunk. Also, alcohol used to make me gain weight, but I gamed that too by walking an hour and a half daily, fasting one day a week, and sometimes having only popcorn and wine for dinner. (Got to save those calories for the almighty booze!)

While I was good at gaming alcohol, a few things about my consumption still made me uneasy: occasional restless sleep, loss of writing time to drinking and health concerns.   

Last year, it seemed every other health article was about how terrible alcohol was for your body. They used to say, “For women, no more than one drink a day.” (Please.) Now they were saying, “No amount of alcohol is safe.”   

 To make myself feel better, I reasoned that my healthy eating and exercise habits would beat back some of alcohol’s nastier effects.

Also I’d make myself feel virtuous by doing a dry January every year. I always enjoyed the temporary sobriety, and sometimes, I’d consider making it a permanent state, but, honestly, forever sobriety seemed so draconian. Hardly anyone I knew was sober for life. I had one friend who had just entered a recovery program, but the rest of my friends were drinkers as were my family members.

And, besides, if I quit drinking, I’d miss out on so much fun. Giddy brunches with the girls, lazy evenings on the porch with a chilled glass of sauvignon blanc, and dimly lit romantic dinners with several wine courses.

Never mind that during those giddy girl brunches, I’d often blurt out something inappropriate or that I’d lose almost an entire day of productivity to a couple of mimosas, or that my lazy evenings with wine would eventually end in a stupor, and I’d fall asleep early in the middle of a movie.  As for those romantic dinners, what was romantic about waking up in the middle of the night with dry mouth and acid reflux?

For me, the best part of alcohol was that first twenty-minute buzz— a mini holiday from everything.  When I got buzzed, I was eager to extend the high with more drinking, but it never worked. You can’t recapture that initial euphoria.                

Meanwhile, my adult son was having serious and life-threatening cocaine abuse problems. He kept denying it until he lost his job, his friends, and all his money. Finally, he agreed to rehab and come live with me after the program was over.

I knew life would be different with him in my house, but I didn’t really think about my drinking habit until my friend in recovery asked what my plan was when my son got out of rehab. Would I have alcohol in the house? Would I drink around him?

I said, “I don’t know,” but secretly I thought I wouldn’t be denying myself wine because my son’s problem was cocaine. Yes, sometimes he drank too much but one problem at a time, right?

Wrong. After talking to his counselor, it became clear that my son’s problem began with alcohol, and that cocaine was a more recent add-on. If he was going to get better, he needed to quit all inebriants.

That’s all it took for me to decide to quit drinking for good. They always say, “If you want to quit drinking, find something you love more.”  I love my son and would do anything to help him with his sobriety, and I couldn’t expect him to do something I wasn’t willing to do myself.

My son has now been sober for over a year and so have I. What’s one year of sobriety like? Initially, I experienced weight loss, improved skin, and better sleep that a short break from alcohol can bring, but the more sober days I chalked up, the more I realized how much alcohol had affected my creative work.

 As a writer, I rely on regular insights and flow states to do my work.  After sixty days without alcohol, my clarity and productivity increased at a thrilling rate. I had no idea how much this substance was hindering that important connection between me and the muse.

If you google creativity and alcohol, you’ll find plenty of evidence that says alcohol actually enhances creativity because, for about twenty minutes, it decreases inhibition. But once the buzz wears off, laziness sets in, and if you decide to drink more, you’re too loopy to create anything more complicated than a grilled cheese sandwich.

Most writers need more than twenty minutes a day for their work. Besides that, overall, alcohol excites the executive side or left side of the brain, which is the critical, second-guessing side that gets in the way of creative work. If, after a night of drinking, you’ve ever woken up at 3 a.m. to a shrieking tree-hopping monkey mind you already know this. Similarly, the tendency to berate yourself after drinking too much is another sign of a jacked-up left brain.

 While alcohol is making your cranky left brain louder, it tamps down the right brain function, which is where creativity hangs out. That’s a bad combo. You need a quieter left side of the brain to play nice with the right side so flow state and insights come easily. Furthermore, alcohol screws with your sleep, and you require REM and non-REM time to make crucial creativity connections.

Sobriety is the best thing I ever did for my writing life, and now, I wish I’d given up drinking years ago.

Do I miss drinking? Once every two months or so, a fleeting desire will occur but it’s never urgent or persuasive, and once I weigh it against all the benefits I’m enjoying, it disappears.

If you’ve ever toyed with the idea of sobriety, doing a dry January is a great way to start but I would suggest giving yourself three months because you need more than a month to get a true taste of the advantages of an alcohol-free life.         

I also suggest finding a supportive online group because typically your friends and family aren’t going to relate.  Facebook has some good groups.  I’m a member of Dry January and Sober Curious. Also, in the beginning, sober lit inspired me. One of my favorites is The Sober Diaries.   

Expect some crabbiness and fuzziness for the first two weeks, but after that, the benefits to your creativity begin, first in tentative tendrils and then, whoosh, you’re suddenly a flowing, insightful productive writing beast.

Are you already thinking about next year and how you might glow up your writing life? Love to hear about it.

THIS WEEK IN PITCHING

Pitches at Publishers Marketplace weren’t great this week. They were either too general or too weird. (Believe it or not, there was  a novel about chasing a giant salamander and another one about  an aging bulldog who eats worms.) Execution is important so these books might be great but still…

I was able to find one pitch I loved for its ironic twist and high-concept premise.

DISCIPLINE, following a writer on tour for her novel—a revenge fantasy based on a ruinous affair with an older male professor—who's forced to confront the other side of her narrative when the real-life antagonist of her book reaches out to challenge her story.

Do you have a pitch you’d like me to evaluate in the newsletter? Send me a one-sentence pitch and I’ll critique it here. Pitches can be anonymous.

NEWS YOU CAN USE

Handy dandy ways to tinker with a sluggish plot.

Interiority is what separates novels from films and author  Rebecca Makkai provides a deep dive.

The always informative Jeffery Y  provides a timeline to authors on what they should be doing before their publication date.

Comps can be confounding.  Literary Renee Fountain has a common sense approach.

No more room at the inn for my writing services this month but there are limited openings in November!