The Wreck Of The F. Scott Fitzgerald

I’ve been trying to work on my writing. That’s the reason that I started this blog. Loyal readers will already know this. I want to make myself write daily because I feel it’s good practice.

But I think I’m missing out on a very important technique. This was a method used frequently during a period in which many classic works or literature were penned. It was something that a lot of great authors did and I think I need to step up my commitment to it.

I think I need to become an alcoholic.

While this is a time tested method of improving one’s quality of writing, it isn’t the only method. Great writers like Hemmingway suffered from crippling depression. Many succumbed to dire financial hardship. Some lost loved ones. Others experimented with drugs. Edgar Allen Poe even combined several of these, losing family members and going through rough financial times while drinking and doing drugs. Then there were guys like Herman Melville who was obsessed with whaling for some strange reason and squeezed a good novel out of it.

Regardless of the source, many good authors have had a great deal of pain in their lives. I need to find and cultivate a source of my own. I’m pretty sure the route of F. Scott Fitzgerald is the way to go.

I’ve looked into all of the techniques mentioned above. I don’t have the courage to try drugs. Hallucinations aren’t my bag. Spiders are meant to be outside, not crawling all over my skin, even if it’s just in my mind.

I enjoy the outdoors. Still, I don’t see myself at sea or undertaking some other random, secluded occupation for years on end.

‘Twas the year twenty and ten when I first began my search for the great Muskellunge of the North Woods. Many a man would give their lives before my journey was over.

I don’t think it fair to ask a family member to contract some life threatening, outdated illness like polio or smallpox just to promote my writing career. I also think that financial woes would be a greater hardship on my immediate family than my being an alcoholic. Bankruptcy follows you around forever and makes nobody want to do business with you while everybody has an alcoholic in the family and can relate to one another about it.

I’m a pretty happy drunk, so while I’ll need to be driven everywhere, there is the added bonus that people might find me more agreeable. Then again, the point of this is to produce misery in my life so that I can tap into the absolute agony of existence and spout gold onto the page. So maybe being happy and over-sentimentally drunk all the time wouldn’t help.

Did I ever tell you how much I love you, man? I do! I love you sooooo much!

I need to start looking at other alternatives. Maybe I could just keep some ragweed in my house and always have really bad allergies. Perhaps instructing my sons to leave Lego bricks lying everywhere and then walking around barefoot all the time would sour my mood.

Whatever the technique, my life needs to be more worthy of a behind the scenes documentary that spills all my darkest secrets. If I want to be a serious writer, people need to hear my life story and say, “That guy was messed up.” I need to be more miserable.