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.

You know what? You can point to alcoholics who did good work in any field you care to mention. Maybe your mechanic did a bang-up job replacing your transmission while drunk or your lawyer was buzzed when he drew up your divorce papers.

Anybody who is a good writer when drunk or high will be a much better writer when sober.

I’m not trying to be a spoilsport here.

I’m not a big drinker but I do like to get buzzed once in a while. When I do it, it’s in the evening when my work day is done. I do most of my writing in the morning. Sometimes I keep going until late at night, but if I do, I’m stone cold sober.

If I’m buzzed, I want to watch a comedy with my husband or joke around with friends. I don’t try to work.

I might get a story idea when I’m under the influence, but you know what I do? I write it down on my running list of ideas to refer to later. (My drunken ideas are sometimes pretty stupid when reviewed the next morning, by the way. My best ideas come to me when I’m sober and reading someone else’s good work.)

One day I did write a bit while under the influence.

I was celebrating some good news, and I hadn’t yet had a chance to write that day. So I wrote something while slightly buzzed. I didn’t post it, however. I decided I’d review it in the morning and see if I still liked it then.

Even when writing sober, any piece is improved by letting it marinate overnight and adding a garnish or two the next morning, anyway.

The piece I wrote wasn’t bad, I noted the next morning. I fixed a couple of little typos and posted it.

And then I read it later on, and found a couple of other stupid little mistakes and fixed them.

I write relatively cleanly, since I’ve been writing all my life and very often editing the work of others. I don’t normally make a lot of stupid mistakes. But I did on that occasion.

The thing is, it works much better when someone other than the writer edits a piece. You know what you meant, and your eyes will slide right over your own mistake. Moreover, if you didn’t know something was wrong in the first draft, you probably didn’t magically learn it before your final draft. Someone else will catch those errors, but you won’t.

So you want to be doing your best work particularly if, as many of us do on Medium, you’re posting something without the benefit of a professional editor.

Write sober. Edit sober.

And if you can’t, it does not mean you’re just a tortured writing genius. It means you need treatment.

Go get it, and come back writing better.

Maybe drink some coffee instead:

About Michelle Teheux:

I’m a writer and editor in central Illinois. Find me on LinkedIn.

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