Unless we count caffeine, I've never used a stimulant - or any kind of drug - to help with writing. Not even during the most against-all-odds of all-nighters, or when facing a pile-up of deadlines.... not even in that marathon-turned-to-sprint last leg of completing a book.
Staring down a delivery crisis, the idea of resorting to some kind of writer's little helper, a chemical crutch, has occasionally felt tempting.... but ultimately seemed strategically unwise. What if I wrote a load of drivel in a manic state? (Okay, okay, I can see the quip coming here - let's say "more so than the usual"). What if I just lost it completely? (Certain colleagues and their amphetamine misadventures gave me a dire warning there).
Better to power through the exhaustion, jacked up on an accelerant cocktail of will and fear and caffeine.
So I read with interest these essays at Pioneerworks / Broadcast about Adderall use, and how apparently chronic and widespread it is.
Particularly, it seems, with those who work with text - writing it, reading it.
The piece by Amber A’Lee Frost on how an editor can recognise if a writer is "on the stuff" was especially interesting. She says she can spot the Adderall House Style instantly and breaks it down into various categories of symptoms:
Endless revision
Fixation on minutiae, leading to paralysis
Sprawl - the piece gets too long, goes on too many tangents, the writer can't bring themselves to throw away any of the juicy bits of information, ideas, quotes, jokes they've come up with
Punchy - wisecracking tone.
Punchiness - picking fights, a prickly, combative, point-scoring tone.
Epiphanies - bolts of illusory revelation.
Paranoia - spotting hidden patterns, secret connections.
What I wondered, though, scanning this list of total-give-away hallmarks of Adderall-addled prose, was - aren't many of them simply hallmarks of being a writer? Inherent tendencies towards which writers are prone?
Especially in the age of word-processing, when you can fiddle away at things endlessly, finessing a phrase or moving things around structurally (whereas in the age of the typewriter, the commitment of the key struck and the carriage return imposed a certain finitude, a propulsive thrust onwards toward the "finished" line).
Especially, also, in the age of the internet, where the research process so insidiously and irresistibly slides into protraction, a seeping sideways into adjacent avenues.
But I've known fellow writers, who I'm fairly certain weren't on anything except their internal supplies of obsessiveness, who produced 20 thousand word pieces when they had been asked for 4000 tops... who have delivered the copy weeks or months late... who got so tangled up in research, they never completed at all.
A few times in my life I've been that person, or near enough.
In a sense, the unconscious motivation of writing - or one of them - is to get oneself into this "high performance" state, also known as "flow", being "in the zone", etc.
The work itself is the drug.
Maybe you have a kind of internal-Adderall latent within you, as a potential - it's what you tap.
The doing of the work is dopaminergic.
You get high on these self-generated chemicals, and then the symptoms that Amber A’Lee Frost enumerates emerge.
Maybe the Adderall is just a shortcut, for those who want to get "there" quicker, as soon as possible?
^^^^^^^^^^^^
Another thought:
All these tendencies
endless revision / fixation on minutiae / sprawl / excessive wisecracking / punchiness / illusory epiphany / paranoia
These are the Zone of Fruitless Intensification stage of "the right stuff" - virtues turned to self-defeating vices... necessary strengths that, pushed too far, become weaknesses.
Dial each of them back a bit, back into the fruitful zone, and you have:
perfectionism / detail-orientation / fecundity / wit / polemical edge / insight / pattern-recognition
