/lit/ - Literature

blah blah blah

IS DAT SOME SOSSAMON

>Basically I haven't done shit, and I want to so I can have that whole well of experience to draw from when writing.

Stop. Right there. Drugs do not foster creativity. They make you feel like da-freaking-Vinci, but once you sober up you got shit.

The writers who successfully exchange the two are very rare. Don't idolize Phillip K Dick or Hunter S Thompson because of drug use. Just write based on what you know.

It depends on the person. I can write pages upon pages of mindless bullshit on stimulants in a matter of minutes, but it isn't anything good. Sometimes when I'm high I can come up with interesting stuff, but other times it's just "wat".

It helps with ideas, not with real writing. Keep a notebook close when you get high. Jot into it. No matter how strange it seems, try to be articulate.

You'll come back later and be all WTF like it's a dream journal, but that's fine. Pick and choose from what you've wrote. That's how ideas are born.

>>545527
+1
4chan might worship drug abuse like the plague, but 4chan is also a subhuman race of basement-dwelling Morlocks who don't know shit about shit even while they shit.

bro, you won't fucking get anything coherent with drugs. Probably the best thing for weird-as-hell ideas would be lack of sleep, but even then you don't get anything coherent. The best aid to creativity is really jsut reading something interesting, learning something new. When you get so interested in something you're brainstorming hypotheical theories, then you've just found your creativity.For real.

>>545537
>>545536
>>545532
>>545527

I didn't phrase my OP post correctly.

You know how good writing stems from experience? I know I'm young, so I'm looking to have these 'experiences' to look back on when I'm writing, so say if I'm writing about someone being high or whatever its not from descriptions I've read of people on drugs, but from actual experience.

Does it change your perspective on things at all?

>>545523
Delicious Sossamon ALWAYS related.

Full Disclosure: I'm lame. I've smoked pot a few times, and I drink a lot, that's all. I've got nothing for you on hallucinogens or deliriants.

Drinking and getting high have never made me a better writer. I feel at times as if they somehow get me in touch with myself or my environment, but they do nothing to improve my ability to translate those into a language that others understand. During the experience, I am even less capable of doing so than normal. On the other hand, I've always felt that it's impossible to competently write what you don't know, and so experience is essential to broadening the horizons that feed your creativity and skill. In that respect, substances are useful, because they provide for you a sense of difference, of otherness from your ordinary experience that can be both ecstatic and terrifying, and can therefore generate for you feelings that, if you're skilled and fortunate, you can put into words and craft into literary magic.

But you've got to wonder if that time couldn't be spent doing something different, but equally or more valid.

>>545540
FUCK YEAH

>>545540
The thing with experience is that it happens naturally. If you go into something with the mindset of 'I want to write about drug culture, so I need to abuse drugs' then your experience isn't going to be genuine and you need not have bothered.
Better to make friends with an ex-addict and then interview them.

drugs have had a defining and inescapable influence on everything I do. I'm always aspiring to approach things from that place

I draw like a fiend. weed sometimes works well with fishing out fresh concepts, but its really hit or miss. if i do like.. some mush i end up not able to properly control my strokes, and afterwards i cant relate to what ive drawn at all :(.

i imagine writing would be even harder.

Anyone who writes about people who use drugs or write while on drugs are shit-tier authors.

>>545592
Aldous Huxley thinks you're an asshat.

>>545612
huxley is a shit-tier author. No, really

Laser Inventor physicist and ESP/remote viewing researcher with the CIA or whoever for 30 years Russell Targ wrote in his autobiography Do you see what I see?: Memoirs of a blind biker that he felt it (weed) sped up the brains processing or something. I'd have to look it up. He tried it once and was referring to jazz musicians. I'll find it later.

For me, it helps. Weeb and alcohol both, but not too much, because then I'll be falling asleep in front of my computer. However, the reason they work is probably because I'm a very nervous, uptight person. These things relax me. They don't make me creative per sé, but create a circumstance where I am able to overcome my tendency to clam up and sit down and do stuff. This is probably also the reason I write mostly at night; the day is behind me, I'm all wound down and I don't have to think about anything else.

>>546212
Weed. Goddamnit.

Also, on one occasion I spent the eight full hours getting drunk over at a friend's house and wrote half a page when I got home. Then I forgot about it and rediscovered it the next morning. It was pretty good, for my standards.

>>545592

>Anyone who writes while on drugs

So, basically, all the respected ones.

drugs can certainly make your writing or any artform feel more lucid. But that doesn't make it good art or writing. But if you can actually do good writing whilst on drugs, why the hell not? Could be interesting. The beat writers did it, Henri Michaux, fucking Hunter Thompson.

OP doing drugs to help your writing is retarded. If you can't write sober, you can't write full stop. If you do drugs solely so you can write about them, it will show, thompson and burroughs were both part of subcultures and generations which so happened to also be drug cultures (to an extent) they wrote about these cultures, rather than about the drugs.

I tried some, but for me it was because I had the chance and also because I am willing to do anything once, you only get one chance to experience this life and the range of human experiences and for me I want to try them all.


Also fyi, with most drugs you only get one chance, so if you don't know what you are doing, don't do shit. And you get an equal or greater chance with many of them to fuck your life up and never experience anything.

tl;dr / in conclusion.
you're being a retard, if you have to ask a image board, you're clearly not mature enough to make such decisions for yourself and will probably fuck everything up.
and no drugs enhance your creativity, you are either able to think outside the box, or not, anything mind altering is actually just mind enhancing, nothing comes from nowhere.

Depends on what u want to do.

Im a journalist so, with the amount of research, analysis and editing involved, smoking is a bad idea. Atleast fulltime.

>>545582
visual arts are better suited to drugs than writing, drugs will almost guarantee stream of consciousness, which in visual art works a fuckload better than in /lit/, because 99% of stream of counciousness /lit/ is impossible to read and really really bad.

a friend did a painting on mescaline once, and i found out that she through it out because she did;t think anything of it, did;t relate to it. i raged so hard when i found out because I really liked the piece, it was just abstract black paint on four a4 sheets of paper she had taped to the wall, there was a real energy and something else that I couldn't quite figure out (which turned out to be mescaline-i didn't find out for nearly a year what the story behind it was)

>>546234
hunter s. was a journalist. and burroughs had to write all those reports. harden the fuck up.
kidding by the way.

No drug can "expand your creativity". They just give you a different set of experiences, which may or may not be interesting. Certainly most experiences you have ON drugs are not nearly as interesting as you think they are when you're on them, but they're still experiences, and all experiences can inform your writing.

Insofar as I'm dispensing advice: taking anything primarily for the sake of writing is a dumb reason. It's an affectation as much as wearing a beret.

OP - Caffeine is your best friend.

OP do you not have any imagination?

You don't have to experience something to write about it.

>>546270
it helps, dont lie.

>>546266

This

Russell Targ: "Also in the early 1970s I had my first experience with marijuana, which was another sensory awakening-this one more ear-opening than eye-opening. As many people have reported, the drug gives the experience of time slowing down. As a music lover, the exciting experience for me was the sudden appreciation of the italic spaces between the notes. In Hayden quartets, for example in the Sun Quartets (Opus 20), the music appears as a tapestry much more complex than I would expect from four musicians. This works for Pink Floyd also. I especially remember their extraordinarily spacious number called "Inter-Stellar Overdrive." It all begins to sound orchestral. I assume that this new appreciation of the fine structure is the result of an increase in the speed of my own mental processing. The only way for subjective time to slow down is probably by sampling it faster. I imagine that must be the reason that marijuana is associated with jazz musicians. Not necessarily a sign of loose living and bad character, it allows them to hear what's actually going on.

One night, some friends and i were listening to the Floyd album under a cloud of mind-altering smoke, when one scientist friend had to leave and go to work the night shift at Lockheed's "Blue Cube" Satellite Test Center (tracking spacecraft for the air force). He arrived to find a note on his chair telling him to be sure to check the satellite's "under-voltage override." He called us in a reasonably clear-headed state to ask if that wasn't the name of the Pink Floyd track we were just listening to. We told him that the beat was right, but the words were slightly different."

Reading about someone doing drugs is about as interesting as reading about someone skydiving. Reading about someone ruining his life through drug addiction can be quite amusing though.

>>546221
Kafka was high everyday

I thought that LSD has a positive effect on creativity, I've probably read that somewhere sometime.
I'm not a writer but I've tried writing during a trip, I got sucked into my work in a unexplainable way. I tried to describe how it was like, but I failed doing that so I got frustrated. Writing while you're high on LSD during the overflow of thoughts doesn't work for me. During the comedown I tried writing again, with succes. The ideas kept on coming, this has only worked once. The week after that experience I tried writing again and I felt ashamed when I read the result.

>>546485
>with succes
samefag here, it wasn't a succes but I was pleased with what I had written.

I'd recommend taking drugs because A) it's fun and B) I reckon you have a certain duty to broaden your experience.

But specifically for writing? See how they are for you. When I get stoned, I talk a lot, my mouth starts racing almost faster than my mind. The rich conversations that I have are good breeding grounds for ideas; some are good, some are bad, most are interesting. As I'm coming down I make sure I jot down some notes from earlier. Then I go back to them later and weigh them and see if they look any good in the cold light of morning.

It's always worked for me. Drugs - whether alcohol or much harder things - always bring me strange ideas. Just make sure you examine them critically once you're in your right mind again.

the beatles, or ringo at least, said they would do these drugs and make shit music. but what they would do was take the experiences they had, and apply them to the music/writing/creativity. so being on acid won't necessarily help, but having done acid might be better than not having done it.

Nice return.

Drugs and writing don't go well together, I'm usually too high to want to ruin it by working.

I find that the good thing about hallucinogens/narcotics (and I'm not a heavy user by any means, but I dabble) isn't that they give you direct experiences that you can then write about later. Instead, they sort of light your brain up with lots of connections that wouldn't otherwise get made between neurons. That's why you feel like you're getting these deeper insights into things when you're high--because parts of your brain that aren't usually connected are suddenly in contact. Usually, these "insights" don't have any basis in reality, and they're just stupid, but sometimes you cook up something really interesting and fruitful. So don't go do drugs because you think it make you a more legit human being with "real life experience," because that's BS unless you're Denis Johnson or something.