Close Menu
  • Home
  • News
  • Lifestyle
  • Law
  • Business
  • Education

Subscribe to Updates

Get the latest creative news from FooBar about art, design and business.

What's Hot

Ohio GOP Seeking to Change Voter-Approved Adult-Use Cannabis Law

May 30, 2025

U.S. Court of Appeals Rejects Legal Challenge Claiming Cannabis Prohibition is Unconstitutional

May 29, 2025

Montana Gov. Signs Bill Reserving $12M of Cannabis Tax Revenues for ‘Habitat Legacy Account’

May 28, 2025
Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram
Friday, May 30
  • Home
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions
Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram LinkedIn VKontakte
Smoke Professional
  • Home
  • News

    More Than 1,000 Arrested in Sweep of U.K. Weed Grows

    July 8, 2023

    Scotland Calls On UK To End ‘Failed’ Drug War With Decriminalization And Harm Reduction Approach

    July 8, 2023

    Germany’s draft law for first phase of cannabis reform

    July 8, 2023

    High Times Cannabis Cup Illinois: People’s Choice Edition 2023 Kicks Off

    July 8, 2023

    Pennsylvania Committee Advances Expansion to State Medical Cannabis Program

    July 7, 2023
  • Lifestyle

    How Watching the News Can Trigger Anxiety and Panic Attacks

    October 28, 2024

    Record High Cannabis and Hallucinogen Use Among Adults

    October 27, 2024

    Weekend Sleep Catch-Up May Lower Heart Disease Risk by 20%

    October 27, 2024

    Energy Drinks Linked to Poor Sleep Quality and Insomnia

    October 26, 2024

    First Psychedelic Church for Magic Mushrooms

    October 26, 2024
  • Law

    Ohio GOP Seeking to Change Voter-Approved Adult-Use Cannabis Law

    May 30, 2025

    Federal Lawmakers Call for Medicaid Fraud Investigation Into Florida Anti-Cannabis Political Group

    May 26, 2025

    Minnesota Ends Criminal Penalties for Bong Water

    May 23, 2025

    Minnesota Bill to Set Up Adult-Use Cannabis Industry Moves to Governor

    May 22, 2025

    Pennsylvania House Passes Cannabis Legalization Bill

    May 8, 2025
  • Business

    U.S. Court of Appeals Rejects Legal Challenge Claiming Cannabis Prohibition is Unconstitutional

    May 29, 2025

    Montana Gov. Signs Bill Reserving $12M of Cannabis Tax Revenues for ‘Habitat Legacy Account’

    May 28, 2025

    Minnesota Tribe Signs Agreements to Open Adult-Use Dispensaries Off Tribal Land

    May 28, 2025

    Washington to Issue New Social Equity Cannabis Licenses This Summer

    May 27, 2025

    DEA Raid Confiscates Over 29,000 Cannabis Plants in New York

    May 26, 2025
  • Education

    CBD and the Aging Population—What Science Says Today

    March 12, 2025

    Wholesale Nootropic Skincare: Boost Your Product Line

    March 10, 2025

    Ideal for Your Business Needs

    March 8, 2025

    A Must-have For Every Smoke Shop

    March 3, 2025

    The Perfect Addition to Your Product Line

    March 1, 2025
Smoke Professional
You are at:Home»Education»Does Smoking Weed Make You a Better Writer?
Education

Does Smoking Weed Make You a Better Writer?

adminBy adminJune 24, 2024No Comments8 Mins Read
Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email
Share
Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Pinterest Email

Earlier this month, my brother and I got tickets to see Argentina play against Canada in the Conmebol Copa America at Mercedes-Benz Stadium, and naturally we smoked a bit before heading over. Gorging on pulled pork and sipping cold cans of Stella Artois till our stomachs hurt, it didn’t take long for my mind to stop focusing on the game itself and start philosophizing about what sports events like this represented on an abstract level. 

The sweaty players, tiny as ants from my viewpoint, struck me not as professional athletes but pretend hunter-gatherers pitted against each other in a fight for survival and victory that pushed their bodies to the limit. Conversely, the 70,000 or so people in the stands struck me not as spectators but alien overlords, watching the bloodbath in the way the ancient Romans would have watched gladiators battle in the Colosseum. 

These overlords, I mused, were rather content with their having risen above the unforgiving state of nature, drowning themselves in food and drink while others fought for their lives for their amusement. But, so I imagined, they also felt ashamed, perhaps because they knew that – deep down – they were not living life the way human beings were supposed to, unlike those on the field. 

I cringe a little when I look back at the misspelled notes I jotted down on my phone during halftime – but only a little. By and large, I tend to be quite happy with the stuff I write when I’m high. And I write high quite a lot. For years now, I’ve indulged in small amounts of weed whenever I’m working on challenging journalistic projects. Not only because it takes away some of the pressure I put on myself, helping me jump over sporadic bouts of writer’s block, but also because – and this is what I’ll try to argue in the following article – because there’s something about cannabis that, at least for me, really gets the writing juices flowing, allowing me to see the world in a new light, make astute observations, and put thoughts that would otherwise evade articulation into words.  

I am, of course, far from the first writer-slash-journalist to flirt with marijuana. Victor Hugo, author of The Hunchback of Notre Dame and Les Misérables, belonged to a society of Parisian hashish aficionados. Hunter S. Thompson smoked copious amounts of cannabis, as did Truman Capote, and while I wouldn’t go as far as saying that substance use was the deciding factor in their literary success, I do think there is a reason that a magazine like High Times – which both these guys contributed to – was, for a long time, celebrated as one of the finest literary publications in America. 

I still remember vividly the first time I realized the creative and analytical potential of cannabis. I was in bed watching Andrei Tarkovsky’s Solaris on MUBI. I had watched the film several times before during cinema studies classes at NYU, and was always bored senselessly. The famed Russian filmmaker was thoroughly avant-garde, telling his stories primarily through visuals rather than dialogue – a stark contrast to the explosive Hollywood blockbusters I grew up with. This time, with the help of a small joint, I finally felt I got it. Glued to my screen, images that had previously struck me as empty were suddenly filled with meaning. Sequences that previously seemed to take ages flew by in a heartbeat. Cannabis had opened my eyes to details I did not notice before. And now, I can’t unsee it. 

Most people are shocked when I tell them I use weed to help me focus, rather than procrastinate. But it’s the truth, and I actually think it makes a lot of sense. Just as the average stoner forgets the world when they sit down for a big, fat, greasy meal or a tub of Ben & Jerry’s, so too does my field of vision shrink to the lines of text in front of me. My mental bandwidth shortened, I focus on a single task and become fully immersed in the story I’m writing. 

And as I write, I stop thinking and start following the self-imposed rhythm of the words. The cliché is that good stories write themselves, and although this diminishes the role of the writer, I think there’s something to it – that writing, like painting or playing music or any other type of “art” – isn’t a constructive process so much as it’s one of discovery, the way some great sculptors say they are merely removing bits of marble to free the statue that already exists inside the block. Before marijuana, said the cannabis-loving author Norman Mailer, “I’d been someone who wrote for the sense of what I was saying.” After, “I began to write for the sound of what I was writing.” 

While I don’t have the medical background to assess the scientific extent to which cannabis boosts creativity and perceptibility, I can – in my capacity as a journalist and critic – connect my own experiences to relevant concepts of literary theory. In his seminal essay “Art as Device,” the Russian scholar Viktor Shklovsky argued that great works of literature hinged on something he called “estrangement,” which can be loosely defined as an author’s ability to make the familiar unfamiliar, the old new, the ordinary extraordinary – the ability to, in short, describe something as though we are witnessing it for the first time. 

To illustrate what he means with “estrangement,” Shklovsky referred to Kholstomer, a short story by the celebrated author Leo Tolstoy, written from the perspective of a horse, who sees the human world differently from humans. My personal go-to illustration of Shklovsky’s ideas is a different text, also by Tolstoy: the opening paragraph of his final novel Resurrection, which functions as a very literal wake-up call for readers to recognize and celebrate the beauty of the natural world – a beauty ruined by the trappings of modern civilization:

“Though men in their hundreds of thousands had tried their hardest to disfigure that little corner of the earth where they had crowded themselves together, paving the ground with stones so that nothing could grow, weeding out every blade of vegetation, filling the air with the fumes of coal and gas, cutting down the trees and driving away every beast and every bird – spring, however, was still spring, even in the town. The sun shone warm, the grass, wherever it had not been scraped away, revived and showed green not only on the narrow strips of lawn on the boulevards but between the paving-stones as well, and the birches, the poplars and the wild cherry-trees were unfolding their sticky, fragrant leaves, and the swelling buds were bursting on the lime-trees; the jackdaws, the sparrows and the pigeons were cheerfully getting their nests ready for the spring, and the flies, warmed by the sunshine, buzzed gaily along the walls. All were happy – plants, birds, insects and children. But grown-up people – adult men and women – never left off cheating and tormenting themselves and one another. It was not this spring morning which they considered sacred and important, not the beauty of God’s world, given to all creatures to enjoy – a beauty which inclines the heart to peace, to harmony and to love. No, what they considered sacred and important were their own devices for wielding power over each other.”

Tolstoy wasn’t the first to make this point. Mankind has heard it millions of times before, from spiritual scriptures to modern-day self help books. And yet, Tolstoy’s language and examples present it in an entirely new light, turning a tired cliché back into an original revelation, into a reminder of something we already knew, but which overexposure has caused us to forget in much the same way that we do not notice the tip of our own nose poking out between our eyes unless we pay express attention to it. 

Smoking weed isn’t dissimilar from feeling estranged. When you’re high, food you have eaten a million times before suddenly tastes like you’re eating it for the first time, movies you have seen over and over receive new meaning, and places you visit on a regular basis – a coffee shop, a bar, a club – feel utterly alien. Not because they are, but because you become receptive to stimuli your tired old brain would normally filter out. 

Being high, to me, has always reminded me of what it felt like being a child, discovering the world for the first time. There was an intensity to everyday existence that faded away with age and experience, as the new became old, the unfamiliar familiar, the extraordinary ordinary. The job of a writer – or any artist for that matter – is to recapture that intensity and freshness, and weed can help with that. 

Source link

Smoking Weed Writer
Share. Facebook Twitter Pinterest LinkedIn Tumblr Email
Previous ArticleOhio Officials Awarding Dual-Use Cannabis Licenses In Preparation for Adult-Use Sales
Next Article NORML: Cannabis Policy Reforms Have Led to 2.5M Expungements or Pardons
admin
  • Website

Related Posts

CBD and the Aging Population—What Science Says Today

March 12, 2025

Wholesale Nootropic Skincare: Boost Your Product Line

March 10, 2025

Ideal for Your Business Needs

March 8, 2025

Comments are closed.

Our Picks

Ohio GOP Seeking to Change Voter-Approved Adult-Use Cannabis Law

May 30, 2025

U.S. Court of Appeals Rejects Legal Challenge Claiming Cannabis Prohibition is Unconstitutional

May 29, 2025

Montana Gov. Signs Bill Reserving $12M of Cannabis Tax Revenues for ‘Habitat Legacy Account’

May 28, 2025

Minnesota Tribe Signs Agreements to Open Adult-Use Dispensaries Off Tribal Land

May 28, 2025
  • Facebook
  • Twitter
  • Pinterest
  • Instagram
  • YouTube
  • Vimeo
Don't Miss
Law

Ohio GOP Seeking to Change Voter-Approved Adult-Use Cannabis Law

By adminMay 30, 20250

Republican lawmakers in Ohio are seeking to make changes to the 2023 cannabis legalization law approved…

U.S. Court of Appeals Rejects Legal Challenge Claiming Cannabis Prohibition is Unconstitutional

May 29, 2025

Montana Gov. Signs Bill Reserving $12M of Cannabis Tax Revenues for ‘Habitat Legacy Account’

May 28, 2025

Minnesota Tribe Signs Agreements to Open Adult-Use Dispensaries Off Tribal Land

May 28, 2025

Subscribe to Updates

Get the latest creative news from Smoke Unlimited about Weed & CBD vaping.

From Our Partners
About Us
About Us

Get all the current news stories, latest trends and legislation regarding cannabidiol, products, usages and its benefits. So don’t miss out any buzz and stay tuned! We offer a minute to minute updates regarding Marijuana industry.

Facebook X (Twitter) Instagram Pinterest
Our Picks

Ohio GOP Seeking to Change Voter-Approved Adult-Use Cannabis Law

May 30, 2025

U.S. Court of Appeals Rejects Legal Challenge Claiming Cannabis Prohibition is Unconstitutional

May 29, 2025

Montana Gov. Signs Bill Reserving $12M of Cannabis Tax Revenues for ‘Habitat Legacy Account’

May 28, 2025
Sponsors
Copyright © 2025. SmokeProfessional
  • Home
  • Contact
  • Privacy Policy
  • Terms & Conditions

Type above and press Enter to search. Press Esc to cancel.