July 5th, 2012 / 8:01 am
 Snippets
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Does someone you know “use substances” when they write?

If so, which “substances”?

And if so does that someone feel they need “substances” to write?

16 Comments

  1. July 5th, 2012 / 10:13 am Anonymous—

      No, I’m a recovering teenager. I notice my poems are better without intravenous speedballs. I keep my eyes open for appropriate lengths of time, at lit hours, and don’t concern myself with low-murmurs one cannot locate (they’re never, never outside the window).

  2. July 5th, 2012 / 10:17 am sam salvador—

      saw stephen elliot read once. someone asked, did you write while you were on heroin? he said, sure, i just write all the time.

      so maybe writing is the thing you do but maybe there are other things that slip in and out of yr life and hopefully don’t drag you under but writing is there, a backbone or a buoy, a journal or an escape plan.

      so if i smoke a bone every once in a while–i don’t do the majority of writing wired this way–it may need editing afterward but, who cares, it’s pretty darn fun.

  3. July 5th, 2012 / 10:59 am leapsloth14—

      coffee

  4. July 5th, 2012 / 11:05 am Nicholas Grider—

      Vyvanse (it’s an amphetamine like Adderall) and Klonopin cocktail.  Not necessary but helpful.  It doesn’t make me more creative, it just makes me less neurotic.

  5. July 5th, 2012 / 11:56 am Ifyr Fiphifive—

      can only write about ALT LIT / NS when im on bath salts 

  6. July 5th, 2012 / 12:05 pm A D Jameson—

      I just heard about bath salts for the first time only yesterday.

  7. July 5th, 2012 / 12:06 pm A D Jameson—

      At a 4th of July bath salts party.

  8. July 5th, 2012 / 12:26 pm Rivas—

      I smoke weed when editing because it has me second-guess absolutely everything… 10minutes minimum on every sentence when on riff raff

  9. July 5th, 2012 / 2:09 pm shaun gannon—

      i know someone who smokes weed erryday………………….. B)

  10. July 5th, 2012 / 3:56 pm tyler lebens—

      there’s a synthetic powder they sell at the head shop in the mall across town from me. It’s called Writer’s DEELITE. It problly makes you string prose like fuckin Fitzgerald or someone. Email me and i’ll hook you up.

  11. July 5th, 2012 / 5:30 pm Richard Grayson—

      You — like many young people — confuse being a writer of substance with a writer that uses substances.  I suppose, though, if one is unable to aim for the former, then one may have to resort to the latter.

  12. July 5th, 2012 / 5:37 pm kjtuyy—

      i’m always drunk when i comment on htlmgiant

  13. July 5th, 2012 / 6:31 pm A D Jameson—

      “Substances” can include laptops, tables, pens.

  14. July 6th, 2012 / 1:10 am Tom Collins—

      I don’t take substances to write. But I often write when I take substances. 

  15. July 7th, 2012 / 8:44 pm Anonymous—

      flintstones vitamins lend my writing a certain edge. I think Hubert Selby took these while writing Last Exit to Brooklyn; Georges Bataille while writing Story of the Eye. I take the bigass multivitamin right before I watch “strange movies”, makes the experience that much better. Makes every movie a walk down Mulholland Dr.

  16. July 8th, 2012 / 3:05 am A D Jameson—

      Now I know why the comments sections here get the way they do.