Friday, October 12, 2012

Hemingway experiment: write drunk, edit sober

I have decided to try a little experiment.  While Ernest Hemingway had a reputation for indulging in alcohol, he was also a brilliant author.  One of his famous quotes, "write drunk, edit sober," has always made sense in theory.  After all, the quality of the first draft does not matter.  You simply need to get something down.  Polishing comes later.  I have an issue with this, sometimes.  I find it too tempting to edit as I go, I get stuck on word choices, and sometimes I sensor things in my writing.  I thought I'd take his quote to a more literal interpretation.

I bought myself a bottle of Riesling wine, and have already made a dent in it.  Unfortunately this particular brand is a little too sweet (I should have looked that up ahead of time).  I anticipate that tomorrow morning when I have to hold a stand at the farmer's market to recruit families to do experiments, I will be nurturing  hangover.  Such is the price of writing.

I'm going to go on record, before I get too deep into this bottle, and say that I don't suggest that anyone who wants to write should drown themselves in alcohol for their craft.  I just thought this would be a fun experiment seeing as how I've got nothing else to do on a Friday night.  Also, I don't plan to get drunk so much as buzzed.

Here goes.
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Okay, so it is an hour and twenty minutes later..  I wrote about 1,300 words.  I'm not sure what I think of what I accomplished, and probably won't know until I'm fully sober.  Right now I think that, although I came up with a few good ideas, my writing isn't very 'pretty.'  It's looking fairly basic.  That doesn't really matter, because the point was to lower my inhibitions and just let myself write.  Still, I'm not convinced I couldn't have come up with these ideas while sober.  Normally I do come up with a few good ideas while writing, anyway.  Nor do I think I would have taken this scene down a notch without the alcohol.  Where is the benefit?

It was harder than I thought to write with a buzz, partially because I kept mistyping.  A couple times, I wrote an entirely wrong word that started with the same letter.  Plus it was tiring.  Unless I wanted to drink a hell of a lot to maintain this level, I knew I was bound to start to crash soon.  It's only 9:30 and I kind of want to go to bed.  Seriously?  My 21-year-old self would be ashamed.  But she also didn't have a full time job that meant waking up early to run experiments.

All in all, I'm not sure this is something to repeat.

Word count- 17327

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