Over at Thoughtwrestling (the blog I created with some friends several weeks ago), I published a post about the classic Hemmingway quote:  write drink; edit sober.  Just for fun, in the spirit of writing drunk and editing sober, I’m publishing the first draft of the post, which is about 500 words longer.  I’ve only made very light edits to the piece in this version, just for spelling and grammar.  I thought it might be interesting to compare the two pieces.  Again, you can see the final version here.

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How to write drunk and edit sober without a quart or two-four

Writers are supposed to write drunk, then edit sober, according to the late Ernest Hemmingway. You’d think that Hemmingway would know a lot about writing and drinking, so it seems like pretty safe advice.

But what exactly does the phrase mean? And should it be taken literally?

At the risk of possibly insulting your intelligence, I’m going to take a minute to explain my take on Hemmingway’s quote. I’m going to try to come up with some healthier alternatives to prematurely pickling your liver and otherwise messing with your health for the sake of putting words on a computer screen. After all, if too many of you take his advice literally, we’ll run out of readers. Really fast.

Write drunk

If you want to follow Hemmingway’s advice literally, I’m pretty sure that you know how to procure and imbibe alcoholic beverages. That would set the stage for writing drunk, no question.

There’s two main reasons why I strongly discourage you from following the Old Man’s advice:

• It’s bad for your health, any way you look at it (drinking to the point of inebriation, I mean)
• It costs money that you could be using to support this website by purchasing products and services (we haven’t created any yet, but let’s stay positive, OK?)

So instead of literally writing drunk (i.e. after excessive consumption of booze), let’s think about this for a moment. What is it about alcohol that provides a possibly beneficial effect to the creator?

• Is it the blurred vision? (Hint: no)
• Is it the slurred speech? (Hint: no)
• Is it the potential loss of balance? (well, maybe if you really need a muscle relaxant… I mean, no.)
• Is it the likely loss of consciousness at an inopportune time? (I don’t know about you, but I can’t write when I’m unconscious: I need to see the computer screen)

Or, is it…

The removal of inhibitions?

DING DING DING!

Yes, that’s correct, the only possible beneficial effect of writing while drunk is temporarily luring your internal Editor into the wrong side of town where no one can hear her and you can go mad doing whatever you like.

Big deal, you say. I don’t listen to editors anyway.

BS, I respond. You listen to an editor every time you start typing something and then think “Oh, that’s stupid” and start pressing the delete key until the offending characters are gone. That editor just happens to be in your own body and it is the personification of your doubts, insecurities and vestigial reptile brain that wants to run away from trouble. Or internal conflict.

The human mind is a fascinating machine. You have a conscious mind of which you are fully aware. That’s what you’re using to read this article and interpret these funny symbols that we call characters. It provides a straightforward translation and interpretation of what I’m writing.

There’s a lot of people who believe, however, that there’s a subconscious part of our minds which goes on thinking and feeling about things in secret. Mostly in secret. We sort of know it’s there but we only get snatches and glimpses of what it’s doing and sometimes in very bizarre ways. Dreams (and we all know how weird dreams can be) may be coming from our subconscious mind. There’s a lot of fertile, creative, and interesting stuff going on there.

If we remove at least some of our inhibitions, it could allow the writer to tap into that rich, hidden world and produce some really amazing things.

So, if we can safely remove our inhibitions, we might find some really cool stuff.

This is similar in concept to the first steps of brainstorming, where you come up with tons and tons of ideas without stopping to evaluate them. If you work on brainstorming and idea generation enough, you come to appreciate that it can take some time until the really awesome ideas surface. If you do morning pages long enough, you’ll come to discover thoughts and ideas appearing, seemingly at random, which can sometimes turn out to be very good indeed.
But if your inhibitions stay intact and the inner Editor starts henpecking you, it’s quite possible that the really cool stuff may never emerge.

So let it come out with as little hinderance as possible. Either learn to ignore that little contrary voice in your head that tells you that everything is crap or else outrun it. If you can write as fast as you can, without stopping to think about what you are doing, you can bypass your inhibitions and let your subconsciousness take the steering wheel for awhile.
This is important because the best ideas come from unexpected places or random combinations that don’t make logical sense at first but that lead to very interesting and important thinking.

Getting shit-faced is one of the simpler ways of removing your inhibitions but, again, I can’t recommend it. Ignore the editor, turn down her volume (similar to what Anne Lamott writes about), or outrun her: those are far safer options.

Edit sober

There’s a downside to letting the subconscious mind spew out ideas: many of them will be half-baked, ill formed, incomplete, illogical, or downright silly. You won’t understand some of them. Some of them won’t flow logically in whatever piece you are writing.

But there will likely be at least one or two really brilliant ideas, concepts, or phrases that will be perfect for what you are writing.

After you’ve had time to sober up (or at least get away from your writing for awhile) you’re going to be refreshed and more objective. When you can think clearly, you can properly evaluate what you’ve written to see if it makes sense and if it fits into the piece that you are writing.

Now’s the time to get the scalpel and start cutting. Get rid of the fluff, the fat, and the nonsensical. Keep the good bits, mold them to fit, and keep building.

Let’s face it: many of us are lousy self-editors because it’s virtually impossible to be objective during the act of creating. It’s better to just let it all come out when you write and worry about how good it is later. You know what? It’s more fun, too.

And if you can accomplish both tasks without getting wasted and slowly killing yourself, then that’s just awesome.

One final note: just to give you an idea of how this works, as I’m typing this article, it’s currently around 1181 words. After I left it for awhile and then reviewed it, the final count was 750 words.

Write drunk; edit sober. This way, though, you can do it without having to buy that quart of whisky or a two-four (or flat) of your preferred beer. You can save your pennies, because when the day comes when we start offering our fabulous and uncanny products and services at Thoughtwrestling.com, you’ll have the money on hand in order to satisfy that urge. The one that we’re going to create. Someday. You’ll see.

[Closing note:  consciously or not, I think I've used some of the writing style of Naomi Dunford at Ittybiz.]