Inspirational Libations

Edogvery writer has his or her own routine. When I sit down to write anything, from a short reporting story to a 20-page research paper, I always sit in the same spot at the head of my dining room table with my pajamas and slippers on. I always have some sort of snack, usually something chocolatey. But, that’s not where my writing routine stops. I also can’t write without a jumbo glass of water with crushed ice. My dog is almost always at my side. So, in pursuit of an intriguing post, I asked myself, what do the most famous of authors do to prepare themselves to write?

Many writers are notorious for going straight to alcohol for inspiration—but do they have a favorite food? Or a favorite place? Can writers be inspired by specific foods and drinks? There’s nothing I like better than a great book and a delectable meal. So, are foods, drinks, and literature all connected?

In my research, I found tons of bar-books, filled with tidbits and recipes about writers and their favorite cocktails. However, some articles also included food preferences and other routines writers followed before sitting down to write.

After having dinner and going to sleep at 6 p.m., French author Honoré de Balzac woke up at 1 a.m. every morning to write. After writing for a while, he then took a short nap, and upon awaking would start writing again. It is said that in order to stick to this military schedule, Balzac drank cups upon cups of black coffee, sometimes up to fifty cups daily—it is rumored he sometimes even ate straight coffee grounds.

Stephen King, a more recent kingauthor, depends on cheesecake and beer to get his ideas flowing. King says that his sweet tooth has been passed down to his son, who eats crème brûlée for writing inspiration. King never goes to bars to drink because he says,“[bars are] full of assholes like me.” He drinks so much to write, that he claims to not remember writing his novel Cujo. One of King’s biggest fears is that sobriety will lead to the loss of his creativity.

Maya Angelou went to a hotel every day at 6:30 in the morning and checked into a room to write without any distractions, bringing only a Bible, a deck of cards, and a bottle of sherry.

Carson McCuller’s favorite indulgence while writing was a combination of hot tea and sherry, a drink she called “sonnie boy”. She often claimed that it was just tea in her thermos and drank it throughout the workday.

Cat’s Cradle author Kurt Vonnegut drinks a cheap scotch and water daily at exactly 5:30 pm in order to “numb [his] twanging intellect.”

Truman Capote refused to write using a typewriter. He only wrote by hand and with a cigar and beverage nearby. “I can’t think unless I’m lying down, either in bed or stretched on a couch and with a cigarette and coffee handy,” Capote said. “I’ve got to be puffing and sipping. As the afternoon wears on, I shift from coffee to mint tea to sherry to martinis.”

authorAgatha Christie supposedly always wrote after bathing in a large, footed tub while eating apples. However, when Victorian-style bathtubs became harder to come across, she quit the habit completely.

Daniel Handler, who writes under the name Lemony Snicket, only eats healthy food at his desk. He works in a distraction-free zone, with only a window as a decoration.

Joyce Carol Oates told The Paris Review that she will not eat a bite of anything until she’s finished her writing for the day. “Sometimes the writing goes so smoothly that I don’t take a break for many hours—and consequently have breakfast at two or three in the afternoon on good days,” she said.

According to his biographer, Hunter S. Thompson’s routine relied on cocaine and food while writing. He said, “I hate to advocate drugs, alcohol, violence, or insanity to anyone, but they’ve always worked for me.”

smokerGreat Gatsby author F. Scott Fitzgerald preferred gin because he believed that gin was the only liquor people couldn’t smell on someone’s breath. He had a notoriously small tolerance and lived the drunken lifestyle that is so often associated with the roaring twenties. Apparently he and his wife, Zelda, were infamous pranksters, doing things like swimming in the fountain at the Plaza, going to parties in pajamas, and boiling their party guests’ watches in tomato soup.

How many writers, or people in general who don’t even know that they’re gifted writers, miss out on their untapped potential to write something powerful and influential? Sometimes we assume that people are born with great talents and blessed with the streak of genius it takes someone to produce a work of art that has the power to change people’s outlook on the world. How many of us have the capability to write something amazing but our ideas are stuck deep down inside, impossible to grasp and produce? What makes writers be able to dig out those ideas, embellish them and share them with anyone willing to read their work? From my own experience, no matter what I’m writing, it’s not until I go to my own writing spot and follow my own routine that I can fish deep down and really be creative and inventive with my thoughts and ideas. However, along with routine comes discipline; finding your routine takes trial-and-error. You’ve got to figure out what does and what does not draw out your creative drive, what routine you actually enjoy. Some of the most famous writers mentioned above have the most specific and personal of routines—maybe that’s the key to good writing.

— Emily Flippo


Sara Korash-Schiff is a senior English and journalism and mass communications major at Washington and Lee.  She has served as  an intern for Hachette Book Group in Nashville and a reporting intern for The Springfield Republican.  After graduation, she plans to travel throughout Europe and attend a graduate creative writing program in fiction.

So, Tell Me About Yourself? (Better Yet, Keep It To Yourself)

In the modern era where the online world leads to people posting pictures of their #delicious meals and over-sharing details of their lives that no one, not even their parents really want to hear, a strange wave has overtaken memoir, causing the genre, as a whole, to suffer.

memoirsAt one time memoir was considered a genre left for literary individuals or cultural figures who had lived life to the fullest or undergone some process of self-discovery that made their stories worthy of a public audience. But in recent years, this type of memoir has become overlooked and has been replaced, like a lot of great literature is, by works of nonfiction written by celebrities whose rise to stardom is deemed worthy of a book (i.e. whichever B-list celebrity publishers decide will make them the most money by writing about their drug problems, or embarrassing sexual endeavors) and memoirs that have on-screen potential.

These days it seems that everyone with a comUntitledputer and the ability to form a sentence (although not always a grammatically correct one) thinks they can and should write a memoir; there is even a Memoir Writing for Dummies manual available for those just starting out. This both upsets me and excites me as a writer and reader of nonfiction. On the downside I see how this growing genre is becoming overly commercialized, but I also see how the influx of people writing memoir and creative nonfiction could potentially result in new icons of the genre.

It feels as if memoir is currently being broken down into subgenres, with literary memoir only making up a small percentage of the books being written. The first subgenre surging in popularity is the often-frivolous celebrity memoir. These little gems have been popular and profitablUntitlede for decades now, with nonfiction publishers clinging to the notion that the general public will want to know how stars and the elite made their fames and fortunes (or lost them both). In 2014 alone, Amy Poehler, Oprah Winfrey, Neil Patrick Harris, Lena Dunham, Alan Cumming, Rob Lowe, Danielle Fishel, Mario Lopez, and Joan Rivers all came out with memoirs. Other memoirs of the past decade include the highly successful Bossypants by Tina Fey and Mindy Kaling’s book, Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me? (And Other Concerns). I have read many of these titles, and though I often found them comical and, occasionally, well written, they seem to blend into one indistinguishable memoir after time, with only a few strange or innovative pieces among them. Lena Dunham’s Not that Kind of Girl: A Young Woman Tells You What She’s “Learned” stands out to me in particular, as her style and content are compelling and Dunham is seemingly unafraid to discuss taboo issues. But even Dunham, who went to Oberlin College for creative writing, slips into an advice-giving tone at time that I find clichéd.

Along with the celebrity memoir subgenre, the memoir fit for movie production has flourished. New additions to this subgenre include American Sniper and Wild. But before this year many other memoirs have been further commercialized by Hollywood, including, but not limited to, Not Without My Daughter, Marley & Me: Life and Love With the World’s Worst Dog, Eat, Pray, Love, and Girl, Interrupted. Even the well-written and intriguing story of former Smith College student Piper Kerman has been claimed by Netflix and altered for television purposes. While I’ve read many of these works and been entertained and captivated by some of the stories I cannot say that these are the most worthy of public acclaim.

As the caliber of writing in these memoir subgenres improves, there is the ever-popular high school reading list memoir. This rather small, yet common, list is made up of the classics. They mainly follow the lives of famous historical figures or leaders who’s works are now associated with societal change. This list consists of books like Anne Frank’s A Diary of a Young Girl, Ellie Wiesel’s Night, Maya Angelou’s I Know Why the Cage Bird Sings, and Barbara Ehrenreich’s Nickel and Dimed: On (Not) Getting By in America. After reading every one of these memoirs throughout my high school career, I came to appreciate how open each of these people write about their lives and the injustices they endured throughout them, and I do think they are important touchstones of the genre; however, so many more nonfiction collections and memoirs have come out since the previously listed were published.

While I will not blatantly recommend against reading any of these subgenres – as I have read and enjoyed many of them already – I’m reluctant to endorse these branches of memoir/nonfiction. Though many of them are often entertaining aUntitled2nd good for a thoughtless read on the beach, these types of memoirs do not give an accurate depiction of the genre as a whole. Memoirs like reality star Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi’s 2011 memoir Confessions of a Guidette is not a piece of literature that young nonfiction writers should aspire to emulate. Instead of emphasizing celebrities, drama, and historic figures, we need to consider emphasizing emerging memoirists who make the ordinary extraordinary or who are able to write with such candor and control that readers can tell they are reading the works of literary masters. I want to see memoirs like Mary Karr’s The Liar’s Club and Lit, Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking, or Jo Ann Beard’s The Boys of My Youth, memoirs that made me want to become a writer, get more recognition and readership. I want truly remarkable memoirs to be the works people first think of when they think of the genre and I want the celebrity fluff to take a backseat for a while. But maybe I’m just being too optimistic about what the general public is willing to read.


Sara Korash-Schiff is a senior English and journalism and mass communications major at Washington and Lee.  She has served as  an intern for Hachette Book Group in Nashville and a reporting intern for The Springfield Republican.  After graduation, she plans to travel throughout Europe and attend a graduate creative writing program in fiction.