The Writing Life after Adderall

[BookWoman]

Any writers out there who thought they'd found the key to being the next Kerouac when they had that first buzzy, words-flowing-faster-than-I-can type feeling on Adderall? I did, and then I found out that Kerouac actually did write On The Road in a haze of amphetamines, a realization that confirmed my conviction that I'd found the key to literary success. I've since decided that I'd rather live fully than give myself up to take adderall and write some whacked-out philosophical rambling prose.

I've been on and off for a year, about a month sober right now, but I still love writing, have hopes of doing it professionally even, and can't shake the nagging feeling that if I just had one more pill I could get that short story started.  

 

Any advice or commiseration out there?

[Jon]

_{Commiseration? No. I refuse to romanticize the superman qualities I had while taking the pill. Do you not remember the obsessions you had while cranking out hundreds of words? Do you not remember the distractions your writing took into complete discourses on stuff that had no place in your story?}

 

_{Do you like playing with fire? Two or three years could easily pass by before your next choice point arrives about taking Adderall. It’s just not worth it.}

[Cassie]

Your writing/creativity will be so much better off Adderall (maybe not  right away, but in the long run).

 

P.S: "On the Road" sucks! When I finally read it (in my early 30s) I thought it was one of the most boring, overrated books I'd ever read!

[Zerokewl]

Kerouac was an epicdly tragic drug addict / alcoholic . Your going to need to take more than a few addy's to achieve Kerouac levels of tragedy.    If you are really gonna do this you need to start drinking and smoking  heavily. How are you with being homeless?  Also you'll need to start doing heroin.

 

Or you can find some literary role models that lived to be 90, drank tea,  and enjoyed every minute of it. Probably a lot more common.   

[Guest greg]

Any writers out there who thought they'd found the key to being the next Kerouac when they had that first buzzy, words-flowing-faster-than-I-can type feeling on Adderall? I did, and then I found out that Kerouac actually did write On The Road in a haze of amphetamines, a realization that confirmed my conviction that I'd found the key to literary success. I've since decided that I'd rather live fully than give myself up to take adderall and write some whacked-out philosophical rambling prose.

I've been on and off for a year, about a month sober right now, but I still love writing, have hopes of doing it professionally even, and can't shake the nagging feeling that if I just had one more pill I could get that short story started.  

 

Any advice or commiseration out there?

 

I definitely wrote lots of stuff on adderall. Lately, Ive been thinking to myself how neat it would be to write a novel or something. But it will have to be adderall free. going back to that is no option.

[Guest greg]

Your writing/creativity will be so much better off Adderall (maybe not  right away, but in the long run).

 

P.S: "On the Road" sucks! When I finally read it (in my early 30s) I thought it was one of the most boring, overrated books I'd ever read!

 

I agree. I thought On the Road was so boring. I could not get through it!!!! 

[Zerokewl]

Jon, I like the idea of choice points. I really gotta quit smoking. I'm going to meditate on my choice point tonight. 

[BeHereNow]

Your writing/creativity will be so much better off Adderall (maybe not  right away, but in the long run).

 

P.S: "On the Road" sucks! When I finally read it (in my early 30s) I thought it was one of the most boring, overrated books I'd ever read!

 

I have to agree, I tried to read it in high school, and I think again in early college.  Which sounds like it would be the perfect age to read something like that and be really positively affected by it right?   It was so boring, I couldn't get past the first couple chapters.  I tried so hard to like it but couldn't.

 

I wonder what it would have been like if he had written it clean. Probably better.

 

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote on some kind of speed too.  I read some of his writings when I was tweaked out.  Even then, I didn't find Being and Nothingness to be very well written, or very good.  I don't know if it would engage me now that I'm clean.   His writing sometimes just isn't......human.  It's like his heart is missing or something.  He has a pretty agonistic and dehumanized worldview, and he says some pretty messed up things too.  Come to think of it, looking back, I can see the amphetamines in the personality that emerges through his writing.

 

Also, when I read student writing, I can sometimes tell, or at least strongly suspect, if they wrote it while tweaking.  (One of these suspicions, btw, was confirmed when the student tried to use her ADD med as an excuse!)  I grade probably thousands of essays a year and many/most of them write like human beings, with mistakes and a heart and a genuine voice and everything.   Some of the tweaked out essays ARE good.  But they're usually really boring to be honest, excessively dense, go off on tangents, repeat themselves, etc.  You can almost hear the fake adderall confidence (sometimes arrogance) in their writing.  Still, some of them get A's.   But some of them get B- or C's because they go so far off track.   So it doesn't automatically make their writing better--they just think it does.  

 

Also, lately I've been rereading some of what I wrote when I was on adderall and felt so "inspired" at the time.    I even bore myself!!!!!! 

 

When it comes down to it, if I had to choose, I'd rather read half-assed bad writing that was obviously done with minimal effort than some tweaked out b.s., which is sometimes even worse anyways.

[BookWoman]

I have to agree, I tried to read it in high school, and I think again in early college.  Which sounds like it would be the perfect age to read something like that and be really positively affected by it right?   It was so boring, I couldn't get past the first couple chapters.  I tried so hard to like it but couldn't.

 

I wonder what it would have been like if he had written it clean. Probably better.

 

Jean-Paul Sartre wrote on some kind of speed too.  I read some of his writings when I was tweaked out.  Even then, I didn't find Being and Nothingness to be very well written, or very good.  I don't know if it would engage me now that I'm clean.   His writing sometimes just isn't......human.  It's like his heart is missing or something.  He has a pretty agonistic and dehumanized worldview, and he says some pretty messed up things too.  Come to think of it, looking back, I can see the amphetamines in the personality that emerges through his writing.

 

Also, when I read student writing, I can sometimes tell, or at least strongly suspect, if they wrote it while tweaking.  (One of these suspicions, btw, was confirmed when the student tried to use her ADD med as an excuse!)  I grade probably thousands of essays a year and many/most of them write like human beings, with mistakes and a heart and a genuine voice and everything.   Some of the tweaked out essays ARE good.  But they're usually really boring to be honest, excessively dense, go off on tangents, repeat themselves, etc.  You can almost hear the fake adderall confidence (sometimes arrogance) in their writing.  Still, some of them get A's.   But some of them get B- or C's because they go so far off track.   So it doesn't automatically make their writing better--they just think it does.  

 

Also, lately I've been rereading some of what I wrote when I was on adderall and felt so "inspired" at the time.    I even bore myself!!!!!! 

 

When it comes down to it, if I had to choose, I'd rather read half-assed bad writing that was obviously done with minimal effort than some tweaked out b.s., which is sometimes even worse anyways.

 

Thanks everyone.  I know that there is no choice in going back, the self-doubt just gets very powerful sometimes.  Most of what I wrote was absolutely "tweaked out b.s." even though some profs said it was great. That's the problem, when the people who are supposed to be teaching you and who you genuinely respect keep congratulating you on the stuff you know is more adderall than you, at least in the bravado.

 

I also realized that Sartre was completely heartless, after spending a foolish year worshiping him.  I don't care if that man won a Pulitzer Prize, I'd rather have basic love for humanity than literary recognition.

[Krax]

actually though he apparently wrote a number of his shorter books (like Subterraneans ) on amp, I have read On the Road was written on pea soup and coffee, seriously. 

 

Regarding people's opinion of OTR, one thing to consider is how heavily it was edited by the publishing company to remove the homosexual references.  More recent bio info strongly indicates that Keroauc was predominately homosexual (or bi whatever), and the book as edited kept out a lot of stuff that would have made that apparent. I mean come on, you have to remember when it was published.   

 

Whether you like the book or not, it was a huge influence on a lot of talented people, like for instance Jim Morrison, Bob Dylan and David Bowie.

[Motivation_Follows_Action]

Interesting thread.  Moving back to the theme of inspiration for writing and adderall, here's a funny story.  A friend of mine, whom I suspected was on adderall, confirmed this for me when I received an email from her at 3 o'clock in the morning.  It wasn't just the time stamp on the email that confirmed that she was tweaking her brains out when she wrote it, but the style of writing was so esoteric {badly esoteric, not like Joyce or something) and rambling, it just made me sad.

 

I could  tell that when she wrote it, she was probably thinking it was one of the best pieces of literature she'd ever written.  She probably spent hours on it.  It was full of belabored metaphors and repetition, it was onerous and difficult to read.  

 

Having been off it for a number of months now (can't really remember actually), it made me really sad to read her writing. It brought me right back to the height of my addiction, when I would do an all-nighter on a powerpoint presentation that others around me would do in 2 hours, and then move on to something else.  And I would think that my work was SO OUTSTANDING, I'd be immediately heralded as the best thinker of my contemporaries.  In actual fact, I got a reputation as being pig-headed, falling in love with my own ideas, beligerent to others, and still not producing work that was any better than anyone else's.

 

But I digress.  I'm not going to comment on Kerouac (I read  OTR when I was 19 and thought it was the most magnificent piece of literature ever created... so much so I made it a mission to travel to San Francisco from Australia to go to the City Lights bookstore and breathe his spirit... ), but I am commenting on the original post.  Sure, Adderall might make you FEEL like you're writing better stuff.   But you are not.  You most definitely are not.  And you might be churning out volumes, but quantity  doesn't make quality; and at the other extreme, obsessing over minor details is not going to make a mediocre piece an outstanding one.

 

And... end of soap box sermon.  

Thanks for the interesting topic!

[Kev9765]

I noticed that when I work on creative writing (screenplays, books, etc.), that what I could've wrote in one pg, turns intro ten pgs when I was on adderall. The additional nine pgs, are pretty much run on sentences with tons of useless 15-letter, , 6-syllable words that have no business being written, & it ends up sounding like someone is trying to impress others with a massive vocabulary. I've been off adderall for almost a week, and when u look at my writing, I think that 90% needs to be edited. The ideas that I thouht were brilliant when high on addy, now just seem like good ideas, that were turned into a sloppy mess. That being said, I did read that Stephen King wrote many novels when he was high on adderall, cocaine, & xanax.

[Zerokewl]

Interesting read. 

 

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-1178151/Stephen-Kings-Real-Horror-Story-How-novelists-addiction-drink-drugs-nearly-killed-him.html

 

"The idea that creative endeavor and mind-altering substances are entwined is one of the great pop-intellectual myths of our time. Substance abusing writers are just substance abusers -- common garden-variety drunks and druggies, in other words. - Steven King

[Kev9765]

Thanks for the read, Zerokewl!