Writing
Write Sober, Edit Sober
Put down the fucking booze if you want to be a good writer
It’s time for an intervention.
No, you don’t need alcohol, absinthe, pot or any other drug to foster your creativity or to write well.
Too many people believe the old romantic notion that a reporter needs to keep a fifth of something in the bottom desk drawer or that the creative genius of a novelist depends on booze.
You’ve probably heard the old advice, “Write drunk; edit sober,” attributed variously and wrongly to a number of famous writers. That’s advice alcoholics love to quote because it implies they’re not drunks but Serious Writers, doing what serious writers must do.
If a few glasses of wine were all it took to create masterpieces, we wouldn’t be drowning in a sea of shitty writing, though, would we?
But we are.
And I get it. There’s a long tradition of portraying writers as these tortured souls fighting to get their story out, fueling their efforts with a bottle of booze.
And yep, there are any number of alcoholic writers we can point to who created great work while soused.
