It may surprise you, but most Neatorama blogging is done while the authors are stone cold sober. Would our content selection and writing improve if we took a few shots of whiskey first? That would be in keeping with Earnest Hemingway's advice to "write drunk; edit sober." Well, the first part at least. Writer Eric Kuentz decided to try Hemingway's regimen. Here's his morning after report:
Link -via VA Viper | Photo: Thomas Nelson & Sons
My head is still throbbing.
One thing I learned, besides being out of practice drinking (no worries, not a habit I’m looking to pick up), alcohol definitely lowered my inhibitions. While this can be a dangerous occurrence at the bar, facing the blank page wasn’t nearly as scary as usual. While the ideas didn’t flow as smoothly as I may have liked, and clearly I lose the ability to punctuate and spell, there was definitely a stream-of-consciousness kind of feeling as I was writing. As things popped into my head, as characters spoke out of the fog of intoxication, it all spewed out onto the page.
Link -via VA Viper | Photo: Thomas Nelson & Sons
Comments (3)
There is, on page 174 of "A Moveable Feast" this;
"My training was never to drink after dinner nor before I write nor while I was writing." -- Hemingway.
Especially if you have a bunch of water, coffee, and more alcohol around to sustain that level for awhile.
-Another thing writers like is Absinthe. Especially for its 'Push-Pull' effect.
-Which is in-place due to the alcohol for the pull and a few of the other non-wormwood herbs (like Hyssop & Melissa, iirc) for the push part. -Sort of like a very fancy Irish Coffee.
No you don't trip on Absinthe; you'd die of alcohol poisoning first. That's part of the copper-salt-bathtub-absinthe that cheapo bucket shops made for poor folks back Circa ~Toulouse-Lautrec.
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+I get a lot of the best creative & funny stuff when I've had only 4 hours sleep.
The frontier aspect was also important. There are planets run essentially by criminal cartels, like Tatooine, because the Empire was unraveling at the seams. Such uncontrolled areas are the breeding ground for revolution.
Make a movie or sell toys? Post-cinema marketing is everything today, and so characters and extras are made to be easily translated into a line of action figures. The movie becomes a vehicle for selling stuff to kids, and is diminished. It is a gigantic product placement.
It also works this way for making money, so it's not likely to end.