Can Another Cup of Coffee Improve Your Writing?
You know the feeling.
It's late.
The lights are low.
The kids are in bed.
At last, some alone-time to work on your next chapter.
You tell yourself writer's block is just in your imagination.
You tap your fingers.
You wait.
But the words don't come.
So you decide to have another cup of coffee.
Cheer up—you're not alone.
Coffee's history as a creative stimulant goes back much further—to a time of intellectual flowering that we call The Enlightenment.
The Grand Café in Oxford is considered the oldest coffeehouse in England. Opened in 1650, it was a meeting hub for some of the greatest thinkers of the day.
People with different backgrounds and expertise would get together and share their ideas—a caffeine-fueled creative environment that helped shape the modern world.
Not quite the silky smooth, blended beverages we know today, 17th-century coffee followed the recommendations of a Turkish proverb:
Even those hardened to the beverage thought of it as “syrup of soot and the essence of old shoes”.
But people flocked to coffee houses and couldn't get enough of the so-called "bitter Mohammedan gruel".
The craze spread like wildfire in London and by 1730, Londoners were consuming more coffee than anywhere on earth, save Constantinople.
Coffeehouses were the commercial gathering places of their day. Lloyds insurance, the Spectator and Tatler magazine all started life in London coffee houses.
One coffee house in particular became synonymous with writing. Will's Coffee-house in Covent Garden achieved fame as the regular haunt of the poet John Dryden (1631 - 1700) whose literary dominance earned him Poet Laureate in 1668 during a period known as the Age of Dryden.
Other literary greats, including Samuel Pepys (1633 - 1703) and Walter Pope (1627 - 1714) frequented Will's, liking nothing more than to discuss the sonnet form or the literary merits of blank verse.
Patrons debated whether Paradise Lost should have been written in rhyme and provided visitors ample entertainment of one sort or another—owing much to Dryden's influence.
The Art of the Cell's website has a superb image (shown right) of yellow brain receptors, called adenosine A2A, embedded within the nucleus accumbens.
All that technical talk means that the stimulant in coffee—caffeine (a mild psychoactive drug)—blocks chemicals in the brain that ordinarily make us feel tired. So we feel alert instead.
A terrific boon for writers!
The reason we get a buzz is even more fascinating when exploring the science of caffeine.
This article in The New York Times gives insights into a study of caffeine made possible thanks to the sequencing of the Coffea canephora genome. The study reveals that plants evolved caffeine as a defense mechanism against enemies, such as certain insects. The same evolutionary process gave rise to the discovery of Salicylic acid in willow trees—the active ingredient in aspirin.
Caffeine has other benefits for plants too. The decaying leaf matter from coffee plants contaminates the surrounding soil, making it difficult for competing plant life to grow—protecting its turf.
Another benefit for the plant is that caffeine makes its pollen more attractive to nectar-spreading insects and other animals—ensuring its survival.
The same chemical that helps coffee plants also helps us. In extremely high
doses
it is dangerous, but at low doses, it stimulates our brain activity.
Coffee could be a writer's best friend.
