It's always the gift of the writer to spin his best webs of enchantment when he's trashed out of his skull because everybody likes to read the ravings of a mad man. The talent is learning to fuction better in said states. A trashy town and a back alley bar aren't the best way to do that, but when you find yourself face down in the gutter, it seems like a perfectly reasonable time to write about Don Quixote or Alice. Tripped out on a million different substances, that create colors like a lightbright, interchanging reality to a series of pixels that can be manipulated by the users mind, is a great way to have a million stories to tell and no way to tell them.
Isn't it strange, how sometimes the story one's trying to tell are deep within their ravings of lunacy? Lewis Caroll smokes opium and writes about a catapillar that does the same, while an old sea salt like Ernest Hemingway who lived in the Florida keys writes about an old man, in a fishing boat out in the sea. Then he blows his brains out. That story made me want to blow my brains out at points, so I feel his pain. I got the message. Fishing is incredibly long and drawn out and has very little payback. It makes you want to put a twelve gage between your eyes and pull the trigger; I get it now.
Some authors don't even try to disguise their stories like John Steinbeck who wrote, "Travels With Charley" which was a true story about him and his dog. Bill Bryson can tell a fantastic story with his book, "Into The Woods."
Still other authors, like Tim O'Brien and Jean Sheppard tell true life stories that either slightly resemble their own lives or are complete fabrications of something that associates with their own lives in no way, shape or form. I suppose that's true freedom for a writer; to totally escape their own reality; but damned I'd be if F. Scott Fitzgerald wasn't a rich playboy and J. D. Salenger an emo shut in.
The truth of the matter is most likely this: sometimes insanity and the loss of ones minds lead them back to themselves and sometimes it leads them into some other direction that matters very little to reality's floundering norms. In any case, they're all a bunch of crazy people, or they just wouldn't be that good.
