Write drunk, edit sober
„Write drunk, edit sober.“
Ernest Hemingway once said that. And while I don’t know if it’s perfectly true, I pour myself a glass of wine this moment, sitting in my half-dark kitchen on an early Saturday night. The world outside is bathed in silver and I ask myself the question that ponders my heart to this article: why do we write? Why have so many people over so many years put themselves in this lot?
I could tell you about the feeling behind it. Because every writer sometimes has the feeling that, besides writing, there is not much he can do. He lingers through life, most of us not being payed for their work at all or relying their whole life on jobs that barely pay equal to the time they consume. Every writer knows the feeling of having to write, inevitably. But most of us don’t even have the time to live enough as that we could tell you in all the stories.
I am afraid, the only thing I can tell you about in the end is why I write. It started out first as a fondness of books, of words, of stories. Because whatever we write and no matter how much of it, first of all, we are not only writers but readers. We have all at some point lost our heart to a story, to a character, to a book. And I think a part of us understood that all these writers wanted to tell you something. They didn't only want to write stories about girls and boys and families and saving the world. These are stories about hope and friendship and loyalty and romance. About life. We tend to forget this sometimes.
I think there are some storytellers in this world who can work their words like magicians. They can make you so lost in a story, you're turning page by page and before you know it, you're in the final chapter, already reminiscing how this book took you so far away.
And that is in fact what writing is all about. How far can it take you away? How can all these stories about the most humanly things of all, about hope and endearment and the magic of life itself, give a value to life you wouldn’t have known otherwise? And we, as humans, as writers try to answer this question in every possible variety of the answer there is. I think writing needs a bit of drunkenness, of life. Of life that doesn’t exist when you’re sober. After all, we write our own stories and while we keep being unsure about the ways our lives may go, don’t we all deserve to witness some happy endings beforehand?
In the end, I still don’t know what to tell you. Is writing (or reading for that matter) something closer to the sense of life than other things? I don’t think so. But I think that it makes life a little bit easier, a little bit more bearable. And for that alone, I think it’s treasurable and precious. Because everything of this quality is quality of life itself.
I always write poetry
as if a gun was held beside my head;
ready to go off anytime,
firing a bullet I never got to see.
Because what else
is writing poetry if not
looking into the face of death?
How else would you write poetry
without cold steel
hold up against your temple?
There are no other ways,
I tried it.
You pull that muzzle close, let it rest against your skin
&
light yourself a cigarette
&
this sensation of falling tickles you
& you smile.
Because falling in love or asleep or apart? It’s all the same.
- The Bullet Poem (2017)
At some point in life, I learned the hardest decisions would always mean holding on or letting go.
(Journals - How it ripped out my heart)
Poetry did something to me. Now I can only fall in love with people I have no words for.
(Journals - How it ripped out my heart)