I've Got Addiction Down to a Tea

Keith Raffel
Wed, 14 Jan 2026 14:39:32 -0800
Opinion

The advice to "Write drunk, edit sober" is often attributed (probably incorrectly) to the hard-drinking Ernest Hemingway, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist.

Here's my own riff on that advice.

I could not have written five novels or 150 columns without swilling my beverage of choice between sentences. No, not bourbon, not Scotch, not absinthe. Just plain old tea.
Updated: Wed Jan 14, 2026

The advice to "Write drunk, edit sober" is often attributed (probably incorrectly) to the hard-drinking Ernest Hemingway, the Nobel Prize-winning novelist.

Here's my own riff on that advice.

I could not have written five novels or 150 columns without swilling my beverage of choice between sentences. No, not bourbon, not Scotch, not absinthe. Just plain old tea.

What gasoline is to an internal combustion engine under a car's hood, tea is to the writing engine inside my skull. It keeps me chugging along.

I have a friend who wrote two terrific novels years ago. Then he had a baby and gave up smoking. The baby is now an adult, but my friend hasn't written another book since. He needed to puff on a cigarette to write. I need to drink tea, which is a little better for my health, and that of my children as well.

Four of my novels were written at a coffee shop. Every morning I'd stroll in and put on my noise-canceling headphones. Tina or another server would whisk a pot of loose-leaf tea over to my reserved table, and I'd drink my first cup and get to pounding on my laptop's keys. Before long, I'd drift off into a different world, one of my imagination, where a terrorist bomb might explode just yards away or where characters find themselves trapped in a tunnel under Jerusalem's Temple Mount.

The cafe staff would keep supplying me with pot after pot of the magic potion that allowed me to extend my stay in the fictional world where the hero is more courageous, more principled and stronger than I am in this world. That was the routine that allowed me, for example, to finish the first draft of my thriller "Smasher" in about four months.

Leo Tolstoy once said, "I must drink lots of tea or I cannot work. Tea unleashes the potential which slumbers in the depth of my soul." I do wonder how many pots of the beverage he consumed in writing the 1,250 pages of his masterpiece "War and Peace."

In writing this column every week, I can't just drift off to another world as I do when novel-writing. I must have my feet firmly planted in this one. Depending on whether I am home or on campus, I write this column seated at a desk staring through a window at a row of pear trees or at a college quad. I must admit it's much more fun spending time in a fictional realm, where justice (usually) triumphs and I have (some) control over what happens.

And yet, as I write this column now, I am still quaffing tea. I still need the fuel but need to up the octane. In writing my novels I relied on green tea. A heading in the scientific journal Nature highlighted that tea's "mood-altering magic." When writing about the fraught world of violence and injustice we actually live in, I turn to what the English call "builder's tea," a rougher, harsher brew, a black tea meant for blue-collar workers. Green tea promotes a relaxed focus; builder's black tea provides more stimulation but less calm. The first variety is for longer works such as novels, the second for short pieces written in a frenzy such as columns.

When I don't drink my daily dose of tea, I get a headache that threatens to split my skull in two. I tell myself I could quit anytime, but I do not. Now what do you call a condition where you tell yourself you can quit anytime but don't, and, when you don't partake, you have physical withdrawal symptoms?

I'll tell you my answer. It's addiction. I am addicted to tea. Science tells me it might even help me live longer. According to a recent study in the Annals of Medicine, drinkers of two or more cups of black tea each day lower their risk of premature death by 9-13%.

As addictions go, tea's a lot better than alcohol, opioids or cigarettes, don't you think? And as a bonus, those cups give me the fuel I need to write this column. On the other hand, I thought I'd better 'fess up and admit I was under the influence when I wrote it.

Cheers!

(SET CAPTION) Keith Raffel writes on his laptop in a cafe. Photo courtesy of Keith Raffel (END CREDIT)