“Write Drunk, Edit Sober” Is Bad Advice | Hacker News Reader

“Write Drunk, Edit Sober” Is Bad Advice

goinswriter.com

37 pointsbemmu62 comments

I had always heard this used as kind of a metaphor: do whatever the hell you want to in writing, follow every thread, wander all over the place, believe your own bullshit, and just get all the ideas out of you and onto the page. When you edit, then it's time to worry about what your point actually is and how your reader will understand it. It's a little weird to me that someone would take this aphorism literally.

Taking things too literally seems to be a plague infecting many topics lately. I've interpreted the phrase similarly, do whatever you need to, just get "it" out of your head! Perfection is the enemy of good.

Hold on. I need to start a pointless semantics debate with you by taking what you said completely literally and it won't end until we've defined all the words.

The internet in a freaking nutshell, I'm so not going to miss that part once this pile of crap tips over.

How is the internet "tipping over" going to change what's fundamentally human?

Changing the interpretation of what someone said to fit your argument can be seen on the school playground and in Plato's Gorgias. It's not going away anytime soon.

Agreeing on an interpretation is the first step to conceiving an argument. Wrestling through this is a big part of having a discussion, and someone can always try to unfairly assume the interpretation that suits them, often the least charitable one.

I would be very, very careful about assuming that any observed behaviors are fundamentally human. Leave people alone to do their thing and you would get an entirely different set of behaviors. There's no question that the internet amplifies our worst tendencies, with a little help from the psychopaths on top of the big tech pyramid. It will tip over, because it's not viable in the long term.

So basically you're saying you hate charities.

Soon: "Taking Things Literally Considered Harmful"

I enjoy this comment.

This is a case where most people are going to naturally take it literally. Most people don't hear someone espouse "write drunk, edit sober" and think "oh i bet that's a metaphor, they hear a justification to drink more. This is actually the first time I've heard someone claim that quip isn't literal, ever. That's because its not formed as metaphorical advice, its formed as a very specific instruction. There's nothing there to indicate that it should be mulled over and tweaked apart for deeper information.

This reminds me of the recent poster PETA put out. It asks people to say "feed 2 birds with one scone" instead of the familiar version. haha

I would have thought PETA would be all in favour of efficiently putting down animals. >.>

Former copy editor here, would not recommend this approach for writing anything non-artistic. Imagine a coder or engineer following this recommendation: no plan, no structure, just throwing ideas willy-nilly. Eventually, you then have to sift through all the ideas, find what's good and what gels, and then re-write to make it coherent, narrative, and logical. You'll probably incur a lot of technical debt and overhead with this approach.

However, if you go into the initial phase with a goal/structure in mind, you're going to be much closer to the final product after your first effort. Many, many writers use outlines/plans. Something that happens a lot in research is that articles are formulaic, they generally have the same sorts of content, so writing them actually becomes easier once familiarity with the structure is obtained.

I would say your approach could be useful for either an artistic format OR for someone who is severely writers' blocked. If you truly have no idea what to write, something is better than nothing. But generally speaking, having a plan/outline is very useful.

"Imagine a coder or engineer following this recommendation: no plan, no structure, just throwing ideas willy-nilly."

The only thing writers have in common is that they each have their own way of working.

Some plot meticulously, others don't plot at all. Some want to know where they're going, others prefer discovery and surprise.

Stephen King does not plot because he finds it boring. He does not want to know what's going to happen.

Here's Flannery O'Connor:

"When I started writing that story, I didn't know there was going to be a Ph.D. with a wooden leg in it. I merely found myself one morning writing a description of two women I knew something about, and before I realized it, I had equipped one of them with a daughter with a wooden leg. I brought in the Bible salesman, but I had no idea what I was going to do with him. I didn't know he was going to steal that wooden leg until ten or twelve lines before he did it, but when I found out that this was what was going to happen, I realized it was inevitable."

https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/books/01/01/21/s...

I mostly agree with your points. But coding or programming is as much artistic as it is engineering. It isn't an accident that the historical center of tech is also the center of the drug. Not just performative drugs but also hallucinogenic.

https://www.mercurynews.com/2016/07/09/hacking-the-brain-sil...

>> It isn't an accident that the historical center of tech is also the center of the drug

This assertion is ridiculous; it could most certainly be a coincidence. I'd suggest the numerous locations around the world known for a period of drug experimentation that are not technology hot beds suggests it is.

I'm not sure about that. When coding, like other comments about writing, I can feel much more relaxed and ultimately more creative when I have a couple of drinks during the process. That doesn't mean that I have "no plan, no structure, just throwing ideas willy-nilly.". Maybe that's what I would do if I was falling over, black out drunk - but I don't think that's the spirit of what we're talking about here - or at least it's not the way I take it. To the contrary, my plans and structures can often come together more easily in the relaxed, somewhat inebriated state that a little alcohol provides.

For coders, it is the equivalent of MVP. The coder gather pieces of code and/or documentation to have something to show. The feedback helps to finalize narrative and make stuff coherent.

But how do you form a plan/outline? -> You do prototyping and prototyping can be done in a chaotic way. And YES, after that you have to clean up that stuff.

As a coder I do a lot of my best work with a beer or two.

There's definitely a different style of development, in my experience. After a few beers or when very sleep-deprived, I find myself avoiding "analysis paralysis" and just getting something written, even if it's not super elegant. There can definitely be a benefit to doing that, though I wouldn't recommend slamming shots at 9am before the workday starts!

There are better, less poisonous and destructive, drugs.

Is it really worth sacrificing your health for? It doesn't even taste nice once you cut through the cultural programming to pretend otherwise.

Having a beer or two is not "sacrificing your health". And if liking the taste of alcoholic drinks counts as being "programmed", then so does every other preference and desire human beings have.

But it is, alcohol is very poisonous; which is why you feel like shit and loose your memory when you overdo it, and why it's so hard to hit just the right amount of poisoning to feel funny without feeling sick.

Drinking poison that tastes like shit doesn't really happen without outside pressure. That's not true of every other preference and desire.

But keep lying to yourself, not my problem.

Having a beer or two occasionally won’t kill you. But making it a working routine, even with such a small quantity that won’t even make you drunk, will definitely have some impact in your health in the long-term.

It doesn't even taste nice

Citation needed. Maybe you just haven’t tried a good beer yet.

Oh, I've drunk more quality beer than most. Stop for six months and try again if you don't believe me, once the body has detoxed it's going to start putting up a fight. I can't even smell alcohol these days, even at the levels of normal beer; it smells like gasoline.

You might not like it, but this is what peak HN looks like

I actually like the taste of some beers.

Your point seems really tied up in your own preferences and discounts other people’s experiences.

Keep telling yourself that then, it's not really my problem.

Or try quitting for six months and see how the body reacts to alcohol when reintroduced.

Gotta hit that Ballmer Peak.

https://www.xkcd.com/323/

I second that on a POC.

It is a metaphor, and I am pretty sure that everyone reads it as such.

This post is about the author being against a thing that no one believes. It qualifies as a strawman, easily.

I always took it literally.

I can’t be the only person that did.

Judging by the comments here, you aren't the only one who took it literally.

I'd never heard the advice before, but I'm pretty sure I'd have thought they were being literal, unless they also expanded upon the statement in a way that let me know it was a metaphor, not a literal statement.

Scanning the rest of the thread, I can see examples of other folks who took it literally.

There may be multiple effects, here: one, that there will always be people who like to drink and will latch on to any idiom that gives them a social excuse to do so. My ex, whose undergraduate degree was journalism, used to say this phrase in a HHOS (ha-ha, only serious) manner. In retrospect, she just liked drinking.

Another effect that comes to mind is that there will always be some small percentage of people who – for whatever reason – do not understand metaphors or jokes or subtext.

Finally, this phrase in particular seems likely to propagate on its own without being attached to the underlying wisdom that was originally intended.

It's really about skewing your exploration/exploitation tradeoff towards exploration if you want to excel.

(Of course, now that I think of it that way, it sure sounds like survivor bias... Exploring rather than exploiting is great if your exploration finds something!)

Kurt Vonnegut framed two camps of writers: ones like you summarize above and others that precisely and painstakingly put each word to paper, exactly how they want it to look and do little or no editing. Both are legitimate and you should probably just use whatever works and forget about the "correct" way to write.

Perhaps the difference is between people (professional artists?) who need to create competent art to make a living, and people (amateur artists like myself) who see art as a way of relaxing and unwinding.

Has this guy ever actually done any creative writing, or just written advice books?

There is a definite use for getting mildly buzzed as part of the creative process. Alcohol makes it easier to turn off the part of your brain that demands perfection and get a lot of stuff that may not be great but can be fixed rather than slowly trying to make one perfect sentence after another. Weed is great for when you need to sit back and stare at the shape of your whole plot and figure out how to get from where you are to where you want to be; surprising and wonderful connections get made. Then you put it down, and sober you comes back and finds the good parts. Weed is also pretty useful for visual tasks; it makes it easier for me to sit there doing fiddly details on a drawing without really seeing time pass. Sometimes it also gives me a power-up to my visual cortex and I can start tracing what I see in my mind's eye instead of the longer route of constructing stuff, but I don’t do that much as it’s perilously close to the point where I am too high to function. And then there’s people who claim that regular microdoses of LSD have lots of benefits for both general braining and creativity. Never tried it myself but I can see it helping.

You don’t have to get completely hammered to get useful creative effects. You just have to hit the bottle or bong or whatever hard enough to have some effect. And sometimes you can get in the groove without any chemical aid; that’s great! But when you can’t, and there’s a deadline... there’s mind-altering chemicals. Use them responsibly.

I'm a professional sculptress who makes math and physics visualizations, weed is indispensable to my creative process for exactly the reasons you described. It helps me get into that state of flow faster, helps me better visualize abstract concepts and figure out how to translate them into physical objects, makes the boring repetitive parts more fun, and it helps me find more novel and interesting solutions to different construction problems I encounter. I never get stoned, just buzzed, because if I get stoned then I can't do anything. And I really only smoke when I'm sitting down to get to work, I'm not much of a recreational smoker at all. Weed is for business hours! If I just wanna have fun, I'm gonna drink beer.

Alcohol has a pretty negative effect on my work, though. I get sloppy and it's a terrible idea to play with sharp objects and permanent inks if you've been drinking anyway. Loosening up and being unafraid to make things I think might fail isn't something I really struggle with because my creative process is super iterative and experimental. That one Ira Glass quote made me realize the power of full-on wallowing in and relishing the ugly prototype stages of things, so I do a lot of that knowing that after a few different versions to work out the kinks and try some different approaches, I'll have something really good on my hands. I love putting a final sculpture beside the ugly prototype it began as and seeing how far it evolved, it's like looking at a baby picture beside a picture of the successful, well-adjusted adult the baby grew up to be. I can't help but take pride in both of them!

I used to do this so much. I'd get incredibly wasted and feel like I was creating amazing art, I'd pass out from exhaustion (also, drugs and alcohol) incredibly excited to show my bandmates what amazing insight I'd come up with.

Then I'd see it sober and be like, "'Club me with your love truncheon'? I can't work with this. I can't ever even admit I wrote this. What the hell even is this."

I used to do similar things, except in my case it was writing longform "satire" while utterly trashed and posting it on social media.

When I'd read it in the morning, it just came across as me being a drunken asshole. I became fond of the Delete Post button.

I also only write sober now.

"Post drunk, delete sober" - said no one ever ever ever.

The article offers a binary choice between 'sober' and 'drunk' (my phrasing) while developing art and says that 'drunk' art is bad because it glorifies addiction and propagates the myth of creativity. It also equates art with work where being under the influence is clearly unprofessional / dangerous.

Personally, I've found that an occasional beer - and some music - while working on a piece of art (as an unwinding activity) can help me get into a zone and sometimes seems to help me think creatively. If you drink so much that you lose coordination or a sense of what is viable then clearly the effects are negative, but I don't think it's as black of white as the article suggests. I'd agree that if I was a professional artist (I'm not) who couldn't work unless they were stoned, this would be clearly undesirable.

Same here. I sometimes have a glass of wine or beer while working with some music on and zone out and get some proper work done. Maybe it calms down my hyperactive brain a bit - I did have ADHD as a kid and used to take meds.

Of course, there is a fine line between having a couple to calm down and getting drunk, when you don't get stuff done.

I think having a couple drinks or smoking a little weed can help you get the seeds of ideas. But I'm not talking about whipping out a laptop in the bar. More like telling yourself you're going to stop working for the night, have a bowl, watch a movie, maybe surf HN or Reddit a bit and read whatever you want. If you happen to have what feels like an idea or an aha moment, send yourself a short email.

I've done this a few times to great success, but I attribute it more to allowing myself an evening off to rest and relax rather than any specific substance. I'm also talking about moderation not getting completely wasted.

I agree that being outright drunk is probably going to be bad for anything that needs precision (or patience/grit). But:

> We would never say this of other crafts. You would never nod understandingly if a plumber came to your house, completely wasted, assuring you he’d return to clean up the mess when sober. That would be ridiculous.

We do say this about other crafts. Musicians notoriously get drunk or high when recording [0-1]. Lots of programmers report doing good work after a beer [2]. I myself find that speaking Spanish gets way easier when buzzed. And so on.

The point is to not overdo it.

[0] https://pitchfork.com/features/profile/9683-cosmic-neurotic-...

[1] https://web.archive.org/web/20101228123251/http://www.comple...

[2] https://xkcd.com/323/

I _really_ like writing prose while high on editable cannabis. The end result is rarely useful except to document my stream of conscious. I have a private hg mercurial version control repository called "journal" that I have used for the past 6 years.

It is very therapeutic and lots of creative ideas are stored away. Each year gets it's own text file and I write in ReStructured Text just in case one day I decide to make my journals public in PDF form or something. Not all entries are influenced by mood enhancing drugs.

I have been known to read what I wrote the night before and swipe some of the cooler ideas as a tweet or expand the idea as a full post on my public blog.

When I drink I don't usually find myself drawn to writing or coding.

I think the more inclusive version of this advise should be:

Write crazy, Edit sanely

There’s some great comedy by the late Bill Hicks about his drug and alcohol use and that by rock and roll bands like the Rolling Stones and The Beatles and what music would sound like without drugs.

Not to disparage the author but I see he is selling a book called: Real Artists Don’t Starve.

I haven’t read the book, I have to ask myself what if that was the approach taken by Van Gogh? What would his art look like? My guess is probably pre-Impressionist Manet.

Carl Sagan was a famous pot head who said something like re-evaluate the ideas that you come up when you high after you’ve come down.

I find the ideas can flow when I drink. I have heard other people say that that doesn’t happen for them.

There’s a great quote on the floor of the Guggenheim in New York: LET EACH MAN EXERCISE THE ART HE KNOWS

I think it’s really, find what works for you.

Completely misses the very important necessity of a creative process, which is to work free of self-criticism.

Alcohol, which lowers inhibitions for a lot of people, can help with that. That's not to say that everyone should, or even that anyone should all the time -- but it can be a productive tool, just like taking a walk, reading a book, or getting some sleep.

I think the larger point that the quippy aphorism is getting at is that one should approach creative work with a sense of openness and abandon, before tightening up and focusing on details. Entertain and explore the variety of "YES" before committing to the bounding "NO"

What kind of source of a man's life is a granddaughter?

I am in my mid-thirties with 3 kids. Perhaps someday I'll have a granddaughter. It is unlikely that she will have a full picture of how I conducted my life at any stage. What a strange way to support the debunking of a quote. Also, I think his take is mostly wrong.

Writing and editing are two different worlds. The comparison with drunk/sober works. Write with abandon, let the spirits, daemons, or whatever out onto the page. Then go back, with clear, focused attention and sort that garbage out.

Not to say a glass of the hard stuff won't help the process along.

Well, "terrible advice" if you want to have a clear mind for the tame trite that passes for modern writing.

But it worked well for writers in the past, from Baudelaire and Artaud, to Hemingway (who did wrote drunk), Lowry, Thompson, Miller, Bukowski, Burroughs, and tons of others...

Of course if you want to merely tie sentences together in your Mac on some Starbucks and never stray into self-destruction or anything resembling an outside-the-mainstream experience, sure...

That said, drinking/drugs as an artistic pose can be even worse than no drinking/drugs at all.

If anything, I prefer the opposite. I can't write or be creative when I'm not sober, even if I've had just a little alcohol and am in all other respects sober. But, reviewing your work when inebriated can help you see it as another person would. Flaws and successes both become far more obvious.

Obviously not something to rely on or to make a regular part of your life, but hey, it's definitely a thing.

I've read this article before and I got a little annoyed. I've never ever heard "write drunk, edit sober" been advised in a literal context, but a metaphorical context.

Write drunk - shitty first draft where you don't care.

Edit sober - reasonable editing done when you have a fresh pair of eyes.

Why on earth did the author take this advice literally?

Write Drunk, DEBUG Sober :-)

Taken literally, I've learned that a bit of wine helps in writing, if and only if I was already writing before I started drinking the wine. And not too much wine.

This was never about being ACTUALLY drunk. You have to be drunk to believe it is.

I think this is just an intellectually dishonest blog post trying to get some easy clicks.

Bukowski seems to have written drunk many times.

Alcoholics can develop a tremendous tolerance to booze.

It does not mean anyone should emulate his lifestyle.

Bukowski describes his semi-fictional self Henry Chinaski as emotionally broken person, who medicates his pain with alcohol, horse racing and the like. He never actually glorifies this state of being, rather, he's brutally honest about who he is and how he behaves.

There can be poetry in damage, but it's tragic beauty, and it's the sort of beauty one should not try to emulate on purpose.

Definitely, I wasn't trying to support the use of drugs to enhance creativity. I wanted to point out that even though Hemingway could have been sober when he wrote, it doesn't falsify that there have been drunk authors throughout history. Being an addict is bad, that's unarguable.

Smoking weed is way better than getting drunk to enhance creativity (in my experience).

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