Anyone can drink, gamble, smoke, eat oysters, dress well, have sex(1) and use their credit card.
However, creative people create, and this is the only common attribute of creative people.
I did a lot of creative writing in college, and a lot of folks acted the part, but when you asked to read what they'd written, there wasn't much to show. Even something bad. Just nothing.
A good part of being creative is giving yourself over to the world around you. Drinking, gambling, smoking, etc., are all ways of letting the world penetrate that self-world barrier.
Great point. However, as a musician, there seems to be some catch 22 here. There are a lot of drug addicts in the world, but there was only one John Lennon, Jimi Hendrix, Miles Davis, etc... so clearly doing drugs isn't a passport to creativity. However, it is undeniable that really creative people seem to flock to drugs and use them as a tool. So you can't say the drugs are responsible but you can't say they aren't responsible either.
I completely agree. While I haven't done or seen any scientific study of this, the connection seems pretty undeniable.
The connection is kind of fascinating. I have no idea if it is correlation or causative. Maybe these things are actually destructive to creativity but are so tempting to creative people that they appear causative. Maybe they actually do help creativity. Maybe they just tend to ride along together.
I certainly saw a lot of self destructive behavior in some of the writers I met. There was one dude that got on my nerves in almost every way, and I thought his drinking was a bit of an affectation to seem creative (the way PG in one essay mentioned that some people in computer science depts talk quickly to appear smart). However, 10 years later, he had produced two legitimate novels, and the second one got a paragraph long nod in time magazine and a longer, semi-positive bit in the new york times book review. I thought it was decent, didn't love it, but it was undeniably real and coherent, not 300 pages of drivel stapled together.
Fact is, he did something incredibly difficult that I couldn't do, which is write a real, legitimate, worthy novel. I respect his ability to create - and I'm definitely nobody to judge what he deems to be the necessary process.
Anyone can drink, gamble, smoke, eat oysters, dress well, have sex(1) and use their credit card.
However, creative people create, and this is the only common attribute of creative people.
I did a lot of creative writing in college, and a lot of folks acted the part, but when you asked to read what they'd written, there wasn't much to show. Even something bad. Just nothing.
(1) may require use of the credit card.