Smoke and Poetry

I took almost a week off writing to quit smoking.

Writers just tend to smoke. It’s the image we have of writers from old black and white photos and movies, of the man pounding feverishly on the keyboard, an overful ashtray at his side, a cigarette dangling from his lips. Then he pauses, inhales, exhales out a plume of smoke together with inspiration – “That’s the word I was looking for: lachrymose!” he mutters and returns to the banging of the keys.

Maybe it’s just that everyone used to smoke, and we tend to revere the old novelists and poets of the 20th century most that writing and smoking seem to go together. Look at any old picture of any of the lions of literature, and there’s bound to be smoke in it. A cigarette as an accessory may point to the writer’s toughness or his insouciance, his manic intensity or his savoir faire. Visually, of course, it’s hard to beat: a smoke-filled garret looks a lot better than it smells.

I was already a prolific writer but I picked up the habit of smoking just before college, twenty years ago. I was so baby-faced and soft that if I didn’t smoke, the next best thing to do was get a tattoo. And in the late 80s, in the deep south, everyone seemed to smoke. The few people who didn’t seemed almost apologetic about it.

Through my 20s and halfway through my 30s, I couldn’t smoke at work, but that was about the only place I didn’t, and it gave me good reason to take plenty of breaks to puff away and think about video game design (“That’s the creature I was looking for: a goblin with an uzi!”) and screenwriting (“That’s the direction I was looking for: CUT TO!”). At home, in the car, in restaurants, in bars, I smoked and smoked and smoked. I met people smoking. We were friendly, bumming smokes with each other, lighting one another (a very intimate gesture when done right), falling into easy conversation while holding our cigarettes just so in a way which Freud would certainly recognize.

Bit by bit, I started smoking less and less inside. Probably in part because more and more of my friends didn’t smoke and I didn’t want to stink up the place. I wouldn’t smoke in my own home office, but go out on the balcony and then when I got a house, out on the back patio. There was still a ritual, but smoking was separating itself from writing.

I’m not an idiot though. Or not entirely an idiot. I decided that I had to quit before I turned forty (full disclosure: I had also decided that I had to quit before I turned thirty, and then thirty-five), so I went to the Meridian Center for Hypnosis in Westwood last Wednesday at 9:30 in the morning and let them do their thing to me. Honestly, I didn’t think it took. A few hours later, the cravings were intense. The next day too, and the next. What was missing for me though is the existential angst that hit me on my previous attempts to quit smoking, the certain knowledge that this wouldn’t work, that it was only a matter of time before I started back again.

So tomorrow will be one week since I quit, and last night I wrote five hundred words on the novel. And they were five hundred pretty damn good words.