It started Friday night and by Saturday, I had a full-blown fever. Not yet of the achy, miserable, death-dealing variety, but a good fever. Maybe that sounds weird, but there are good fevers. The ones that detach you from your usual thought-processes, letting you wander freely through your subconscious and unconscious mind, leaving a trail of powdered donut crumbs upon which a million little mental ants will swarm and feed. Delightful.
Paul Lawrence Dunbar
There’s something sensuous about fever as well. The heat in all your limbs, the heaviness in your eyes, the way every sensation is magnified until even the seams on your clothes chafe and irritate. If your partner isn’t afraid of cooties, fever sex is magnificent. Intense but blunted, confounding and goalless. No wonder there was such a cloud of romance around tuberculosis in the 18th and 19th centuries. The bitterness of encroaching death sweetened by fever-pleasure and hallucination. Some of the best fevers of my life were in college in the weeks before I was diagnosed with TB. Luscious, trippy evening fevers that dissipated by morning. Like a wine buzz, but without a hangover. Too bad it turned out I had TB. I could have gone on forever enjoying those fevers and the fruits of those fevers.
Because that’s the writerly element of my fever-pleasure: the things I think of to write while I’m in the throes of a fever. Perhaps it’ll be weeks before they come to fruition, but the seeds are planted around 100-101 degrees. It makes me wonder about all the artificial means writers employ to expand their creative visions, to access their subconscious, to free them from inhibitions.
Many people write while drinking wine or other alcohol. I find it dulls me as much as marijuana. Makes everything seem funny or clever or brilliant, until sober daylight falls on it. It works for some writers, though. A little too well, perhaps. Joyce, Cheever, Chandler, Hemingway, they were all alcoholics. Tennessee Williams, he was just a lush.
Edgar Allen Poe
Poe went full bore, a user and abuser of alcohol, absinthe, and cocaine. Same for Hunter S. Thompson, although his extensive pharmacological experimentation makes Poe look like a mere dabbler. If alcohol won’t deliver, there’s acid and peyote. (If you don’t mind the “who crapped in my mouth?” feeling afterward.)
As a grown up, I’ve sworn off drugs, but there’s always that other fallback from my college days: sleep deprivation. Such lovely strange visions it provided. Go without sleep long enough and you’ll meet parts of your personality you never knew existed. Or at any rate, your friends will meet them. You’ll have a vague memory of it, like an old movie on late night television that you half-slept through. Later, you can’t remember which parts were really the movie and which parts were your dream.
For example, in grad school I once had a deeply involved conversation with a bag of Legos at a thrift store. It was the product of nearly four days of sleeplessness, powered by coffee and truckstop love. Sadly, my boyfriend at the time did not value the hallucinogenic effects of my lack of sleep and intervened.
Then there’s the simple fact that sleep deprivation can be just as dangerous as many drugs. All in all, I’ll take a nice fever to fuel my imagination. What about you? What’s your preferred creative “drug”?
Bryn Greenwood 
Music. And every piece has an artist that inspires me. My finished novel is all Elton John, the 70’s version of him. Cranked up and full of not-yet-out-of-the-closet angst.
My new one is David Cook, weirdly enough, and 3 Doors Down. Can’t explain it. But turn them up, and the ideas burst through.
Because most of my writing is done with the twin obligation of being on-hand to render medical assistance looking over my shoulder, I don’t often get to indulge in any mind-altering substances as I type. There have been a few occasions where I’ve been in the right mindset with the correct substance coursing through my veins to give me ideas that still work even once I’ve sobered up. I’ve never played with anything stronger than Pot though so I really can’t say I’ve explored the whole thing that much. Maybe I’ll get the opportunity at a later date when my bills aren’t being payed by a medical company.
Mmm, nowadays, wine or coffee, depending on the time. Oh, and some form of sparkling water, always.
When I was younger, I used to smoke pot and write. That was weird because before that I could not do it – didn’t work at all. Then it worked really well. Then I just stopped.
Thing is, I noticed no real difference in quality between these states. I’ve gotten better as a writer, overall, but if I looked at the overall quality of something I’d written before and think, “Okay, I smoked pot for this part and not for this,” honestly, the stuff I wrote on pot was just as good as the sober stuff. Sometimes better, actually.
Hmmm…maybe I should try it again… 😉
Sleeplessness doesn’t work well for me, in general.
Now, I consider music a given. I know there are people who say they can’t write with music, but I suspect them of being robots.
I’ve never noticed any improvement in my writing courtesy of booze or pot…must be why I like a good fever so much.
My fevers aren’t half as sexy as yours! I guess I go for simple caffeine – I like to write jittery.
I am a robot.
I hardly ever write with music. I find it mostly distracting. Maybe because I had a band for a long time and was the songwriter, so I am not very good at using music as a screen – it sucks up my focus. I spend too much time analyzing how and why it works.
I do better if it’s either instrumental, in a language I can’t understand or so familiar that I don’t get sucked in by it. But I get these major major earworms. I mean, I don’t just remember the tune, I remember the whole freakin’ orchestra. I remember the key. I can hum most of the parts.
So, please, give me the sound of silence. It works much better for me.
But then, I am a robot.
AAAAH! I knew it! No, I have to agree with the need for familiar music. I can’t listen to anything I don’t know forward and backward. Robot.
Danger! Danger, Will Robinson!
Shrooms. 🙂
–Nah. (Though I admit I often wonder what I’d write on them. If something requiring that kind of concentration were even slightly possible while tripping.) I guess my preferred drug is caffeine: if I’m not drinking coffee or tea, I’ve got that nasty Nestea iced tea mix stuff, which is some freakish holdover from childhood. I can write without it, but I miss it when it’s gone, and it makes me cranky.
I think the best fever I had was in college, when I had pneumonia. The visuals were stunning. But damn, girl, I don’t think I could have written in that state. I salute you.
(I am a partial robot, BTW. I love having music in the background, but it can’t have words in it, or the lyrics end up in my dialogue.)
Well, I’m not saying I wrote anything salvageable while in the throes of fever, but the imagery and the ideas were certainly used later. Shrooms, though…that seems as sketchy as peyote.
Yo. I am a coffee / espresso freak. Usually that does the trick. Rarely does alcohol help, especially if I’m already tired to begin with.
Sleep deprivation? Hm, Fight Club anyone?
I never did develop an alter ego from going without sleep. That I know of. Hmmm…