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It's to the best of our knowledge. I'm Anne Strain Champs. Today, creative writing.

What do you find in a writer's workspace? A laptop, pencils, dictionary?

Well, you know what else? Demons. Anxiety, depression. And for some of the greatest writers, alcohol.

People like Hemingway, for example, like to start drinking as a way of changing the

channel as a way of letting off the pressure of the day, of that sort of incredibly focused

work that he was doing. The link between alcohol, addiction, and creativity in this hour.

And how do you overcome a writer's block or vanquish an inner critic channel the trickster?

One of the things that tricksters very very good at you is nudging you from a back-sided direction

and knocking you into a different path that is more fruitful.

Jump-starting the imagination today.

Beginning with a Russian-American trickster of a writer, Gary Steingard.

He's famous for his wickedly sardonic novels, the Russian debutante's handbook,

Absurdistan, Super Sad, True Love Story.

Schengard has had the kind of literary success a lot of writers would kill for.

Even his book trailers go viral, which could have something to do with the fact that James Franco stars in them.

So it doesn't seem quite fair that he's titled his new memoir, Little Failure.

Little Failure was a cute nickname that my mom had for me when I was growing up.

When I graduated from Oberlin College in Ohio, they expected me after, you know, $100,000 in tuition to become a lawyer or something like that.

And I came out to them and said, look, I want to be a writer.

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