The Grasshopper on Writing Sunday Edition: Writing and Drinking
The two are associated in the mythology but they shouldn’t be
This is another one people throw at Hemingway, among others, that drinking is somehow a part of being a writer. The problem is that, one, Hemingway did not write when drinking, and two, drinking does not unlock creativity. Hemingway wrote a lot about drinking, but that is the reality his characters and most of the rest of us live in, even if you don’t drink. It was a descriptive device.
I drink and I write, but mixing the two just results in embarrassing crap because your judgment about quality is impaired, which is sort of the whole idea behind having a drink. This is not a diatribe about drinking, that would be hypocritical, but I know from experience that it does not enhance the experience, it blurs it.
Again, I’m going to circle back to Ernest H, because a book like The Sun Also Rises starts and ends with drinking. We watch his characters get drunk, get maudlin, get violent, get loose, get hungover, and get back to it the next night. And it is a narrative device that illuminates their characters and their interactions with each other. Hem writes better about this than any writer I know.
But here’s the thing. Hemingway was a very meticulous writer down to the sentence level. In A Moveable Feast he describes how he hones his prose, telling of how if he gets one good sentence in a day, he is satisfied. This does not mean he only did a sentence a day. It means he may have written his way to that good one.
If you read one of his very short stories, you realize how much power he compresses into very few words, power that is reflected by the fact that even today, writers can learn from his work for years. I still marvel at it.
This is not the result of drinking. In fact, it was one of the main factors that led to the failure of his writing and his eventual suicide. He was self-medicating and likely a lifelong victim of PTSD from WWI, not to mention a son of a suicide. That’s a lot of baggage.
But I digress. This is mainly aimed at beginning writers with a predilection for drinking who may think that somehow you have to ‘drink like a man’ to write like one. That’s intentionally sexist because that was the prevailing myth when I was growing up, that men and writing were related. Today’s best writers are predominantly female (insert various pronouns) and, frankly, they probably always were, but the culture of the day limited them. Another topic, but I won’t address that one because I’m not qualified to.
Writing well, on any topic, requires clarity and perspective. Clarity and perspective could also be the title of this post. Clarity because writing is about illuminating a topic or story for the reader so they experience it. Perspective because the writer, when they put on their editor hat, needs the ability to see their work with other eyes, the reader’s eyes. To step away and be a little critical.
Drinking is not known for enhancing clarity and perspective.
Which gets me to the point of this newsletter in general, treating writing and other creative endeavors as a calling that requires and rewards constant working to become better, i.e. practice. Lots of practice. My goal here is twofold, to help me understand this practice, and to help others upstanding their own process and refine it.
“The writer must be four people:
The Nut
The Moron
The Stylist
The Critic
#1 supplies the material; #2 lets it come out; #3 is taste; #4 is intelligence.
A great writer is all four, but you can still be a good writer with only the first two- they’re most important.”
From Susan Sontag’s Diary
I’m not much of a Sontag fan. I find her overly intellectual and pretentious, but I love this excerpt from her diary. Starting out to write about something does require a little nuttiness, or we might say, ego.
As for the internal moron, you do have to write dumbly (that is not actually a word but…) when you’re working your way into an idea or a story. In other words, you shouldn’t worry about getting it right. Writers have some superpowers including rewrites and editing, the magical ability to endlessly change things until we get it right.
So, she is right, we do have to jump in not knowing how cold the water is. As for numbers three and four, this is where many beginner writers trip up, either because they haven’t developed the elegance of the stylist or their words are so precious to them that they can’t part with them or change them.
A lot of writers never get past that weakness. It is a kind of border that you should aspire to cross. I have to say that even after many years of writing and publishing, I think I just crossed it in the past few years because of writing new articles daily and exploring ideas I am truly passionate or even angry about. To be passionate and/or angry requires some style and the ruthlessness of the critic.
You need to weed out the crap.
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