Writing on Shrooms Requires Protestant Work Ethic (An Interview)

Less purple elephants, more logic and discipline.

photo by Igor Siwanowicz

We’d all love a shortcut to writing success. It turns out that shrooms are not that shortcut. I’ve interviewed a writer about using psilocybin to write, and it turns out that writing on shrooms requires more focus and discipline than writing sober (which maybe should not be that surprising). My interviewee describes the benefits of psilocybin for creativity once you’ve developed enough concentration and sheer sitzfleisch to write through the experience.

I’ve anonymized the details, but I will say this is a mainstream litworld writer, not a self-published or Substack writer. Some of this psilocybin-aided fiction has been given the imprimatur of publishing gatekeepers. Since the interview is anonymous, and you can’t judge the fiction in question for yourself, I do think it matters for the ethos/credibility of this interview to note that the fiction has passed gatekeeper’s judgment.

I’d also like to thank the interviewee for teaching me about interviewing! When I was stymied in the interview process, or in writing up the interview, it was really nice to have an experienced interviewer, with full context for the piece, on hand to ask for advice. If you want to get better at interviewing, I really recommend trying this! I loved the collaboration.

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What do mushrooms do for you?

This practice has really reinvigorated both my writing life and my writing career.

I've developed my work in a lot of new directions. I've gotten bolder and more confident in my writing. Mushrooms make it easy to immerse myself in the logic and rules of the world of a story. I enjoy writing more.

My career had kind of hit a plateau before this. Now—it’s not like most of your readers would have heard of me, but the work I've done like this has gotten published, it's gotten more critical attention and even acclaim. At this stage in my career, it's pretty exciting to be moving, and to be at the next level.

How'd you get into this?

So, mushrooms are decriminalized where I live now. You can buy them safely. But I did them a lot in college, when they were not decriminalized.

In college, I'd try to write on mushrooms, but I'd get distracted.

I got out of buying drugs from dealers. But when they were decriminalized, I decided to try again.

How much psilocybin do you do to write?

It took me a while to figure out. It was too much at first—doing them like in college. I'd take a normal trip amount, an eighth, 3.5 g. At a certain point, I started having this feeling of omnipotence every time. I thought, “I am God. I am choosing this fate, I could choose a different fate if I wanted to.” This doesn't work for writing. I'd start well, the situation would get out of hand, and I'd have to finish the story later. When I was myself, I'd think, “But okay, I've already chosen. I don't need to see God. That's just a distraction.” So I learned to just take less!

Not microdosing, though. Microdosing is not real. One time I took 20 microdose capsules at the same time and nothing happened.

1.5 g is the writing golden spot. (For me! It might be too much, or not enough, for others.)

How often?

About once a week, sometimes more.

Does it stop working if you try it more often?

Not really. You can do it Monday, Wednesday and Friday with a slight increase in the dosage on Wednesday and Friday and it will still work.

Have you tried anything else?

I tried DXM, which basically works really well, but it was making my heart hurt. And LSD, but then it's hard to sleep. The toll that LSD takes on your body--to me it feels like several multiples of the toll of mushrooms, because of being unable to sleep, and then kind of feeling depressed.

What's nice about mushrooms is that you can take them in the morning and still fall asleep at night.

What does this practice feel like, on the like, druggy level?

There's the body load. For the first half hour to an hour, my heart is racing, I'm kinda anxious, my skin is vibrating. I feel this sense of pressure, like I'm getting overwhelmed. But I learned that this goes away.

Mild hallucinations. The letters really pop, sometimes they move. I definitely couldn't drive.

What's your writing process like on shrooms?

I'm sure people will make fun of me for this, but it took me a while to learn to take them and plant myself behind the computer and treat it like any kind of writing session. Just take them and get started. As always in writing, the two most important things are starting and finishing.

I often already have first sentences in mind, very simple situations, like “Cynthia was late for work.”

I mentioned logic earlier. Writing is kind of like playing with legos: each sentence builds this world more, but it needs to click together and fit with the other sentences. Or like improv. You can write anything in the next sentence—but then you have to live with it and make it work. I've definitely learned it's possible to start going down a path early in the writing process that makes the story really hard to edit. It's easy to write stories that don't have any scenes or dialogue. If it's not firmly grounded in some kind of place and time, with a set protagonist, it can be very hard to untangle and make it all make sense. That's really the danger.

Trying to explore abstract ideas is a wrong path. It can be hard to think clearly when you're on mushrooms. The sentences are tangled. You know what you're trying to say, but you realize anyone else who reads this will have no idea.

It's good to establish to your mushroom brain (which is gonna work with whatever you give it) that this is a world of dialogue and scenes. It becomes really hard to introduce these things later.

Also, I almost always try to finish them. Now I've done it so many times that I also have techniques for cutting the stories short and moving on.

What kinds of techniques? I'm really curious about finishing, it's something I have trouble with.

I mean, that is the hard part. It's something being on mushrooms helps with, because it's basically the playing out of the story logic. When you start a story, there's a certain number of endings that can naturally occur from the situation. When you're writing, you start to understand which of those endings you're writing towards. But you want there to be a little misdirection. You learn to write like you're aiming for one ending, but actually you hit a different ending.

I've had to learn to start writing another story as soon as I finish one. Because I'm gonna be on this stuff all day.

I've started trying to do some editing even while I'm on mushrooms. You might as well, while you're still in the world.

It's such a Protestant way of looking at mushrooms. You gotta focus. You gotta drill. You gotta sit at your desk.

Earlier you mentioned you had tried writing on shrooms when you were younger, but it didn't work. Why not? What changed?

It didn’t work because I would get distracted. Time dilation becomes so much that you're thinking faster than you can write.

But now I have muscle memory and habits and discipline. I've written hundreds of stories. It would be really hard to do this if you didn't have a lot of practice writing stories. That's why I'm hesitant to recommend it to people. In college, I remember wanting a shortcut myself, thinking, “If I take this and start writing, something will happen.”

This reminds me of what people say about MDMA. Couples who have been together a long time take it and feel like they fall in love again, like “our marital problems simply dissolved,”¹ but couples who first fall in love with the aid of MDMA often have a lot of turbulence.

Yeah, it’s about remembering something authentic. It’s good to be able to reliably rediscover joy.

So you've tried writing on shrooms in kind of a naive way, and that didn't work. Then you developed discipline without chemical aid. What made you decide to add shrooms to this disciplined practice?

I'd gotten really burnt out on writing. I've written for a long time, written stories and novels without mushrooms. But after a while, it can be hard to find the magic. This industry really beats you down.

Before you get any attention at all for your writing, that's actually when you feel confident. You think, “If I make something good, people will like it.” Afterwards you know that even if something is good, people might not like it. I'd start writing and think, this is just another story that's gonna get rejected. I felt like I had permission to write, and then I lost it.

The first time I tried writing on shrooms again, it felt different. It felt like I was just playing around, seeing what I could do, inhabiting the story, letting it develop its own logic.

For me, the most important thing this practice does is give me permission to write. I take it and I'm like, “This is my time, when I'm writing. I have to do this.” It gives me some kind of confidence that something is happening.

Should I have that confidence? In a sense, no. When I reread them sober, most of these stories are no good—70%, 80%. Even in cases where I remember how into it I was when I was writing! But 70%, 80% of the stories I write sober are also no good. I've definitely written about five times as many stories as I've had published.

But when I'm sober, it's harder for me to give myself permission to write, so I write less. And with a 20% success rate, you definitely want to have 20% of more, not 20% of less. This practice cuts me off from getting in my own way.

Has this practice changed how you write? Like, sober. Do you feel like you've learned things from writing on shrooms that you can take to sober writing?

You learn a lot through this process about human attention. Because your own mind is sped up so much, it's easy to become bored or distracted by what you're writing. So you learn on a very micro level where your eye goes when it's reading a page. Just: what kinds of things actually catch my attention, versus things I just say I think are interesting.

The major thing I've learned is that emotions are what matter the most. If I begin with a character who has some kind of conflict, then the story works. If I just start noodling and developing a scene or a setting, it doesn't work as well.

Stories should get to the point quickly. Early on in the story you should understand what the conflict is going to be. Who has the time to read several pages of a story before you figure out what it is you're reading?

So, your writing is really not shroom-y. Like, I wouldn’t have guessed. Which is great, by the way. But why not?

I think when I was in college especially, I would take mushrooms and decide I was gonna describe what it was like to be on mushrooms. Trying to describe the mushroom experience itself is a trap. There's no way of doing it. It never works. All you're writing down is words, but what's really happening is between and beyond the words, but all you can write down are the words.

But when I write a story, I don't feel like that at all. Because Cynthia is real! I can see how Cynthia works, her concerns. And whoever reads the story can see what I saw.

Trying to look at the experience does not work. Trying to look through the experience, at something else, does work. Everyone’s had this experience, you take mushrooms, it’s really great, you see something, but you come back and what did you really see? This way, I always come back with a story.

I've tried to be absurd like mushrooms would imply. “Cynthia was sad and then there was a purple elephant.” But that world is not fun to inhabit. The discipline--the experience of knowing what it's like when a story is working—let me know that the purple elephant stuff was not working.

With an anonymous interview, the message is, “Hey, you can use mushrooms to work better.” If I say it as myself, if it turns into my brand, my career, the message is, unavoidably, “You can take mushrooms to make money. You can turn taking mushrooms into a job.”

So, you’re not doing anything you could get in trouble for. Why an anonymous interview?

I would definitely like people to know about this possibility of taking mushrooms to enhance their creativity.

I also think there's some safety concerns. I've definitely been surprised by the degree to which boosters in this community don't really acknowledge that there are some dangers to taking mushrooms. But drug-induced psychosis is not just made up by the feds. And that is real psychosis. It does go away, but mushrooms can trigger schizophrenia and permanent psychosis. People can get hurt while they're on mushrooms.

Something like this, anonymous, the harm is limited. I feel like readers will approach it with more caution.

Also...it's definitely occurred to me that there's a culture of people who are very interested in mushrooms and what they can do. If I were to write an essay that was like “I wrote this award-winning story while on mushrooms,” that culture of people would be excited and I would get a lot more attention.

There's some kind of writing guru role that I'm pretty confident I could do, I could make it work. But I would never really know, if that happened, if people like the work for what it is. It would be evaluated completely differently. People would come to it and basically their feelings about drugs would be the primary determinant of whether they enjoyed the work.

For me I feel like it would be a lot for me to carry for the rest of my life being the mushroom guru. It's just not a role I want to occupy.

With an anonymous interview, the message is, “Hey, you can use mushrooms to work better.” If I say it as myself, if it turns into my brand, my career, the message would instead be, “You can take mushrooms to make money. You can turn taking mushrooms into a job.”

You’ve said a lot of things I didn’t expect from an interview about writing on psilocybin. Discipline, logic, don’t write about the drug trip. Is there anything else that you think might go against what people would expect about writing on shrooms?

There’s nothing magical about this. You have to work, you have to learn. But that also means you get to keep what you learn. Whatever instrument you're using sober is the same instrument you use on mushrooms. It's still you.

1. From Irvin Yalom’s autobiography Becoming Myself. He describes one MDMA session he shared with his wife Marilyn during a difficult patch a few decades into their relationship. He also mentions they never did it again.