Wednesday, October 25, 2006

Drunk Writing

I'm sure you've all heard of "Drunk Dialing," when you call up old friends you haven't seen in a long time while you're drunk and talk their ear off. Lots of people have done it. Maybe even you. But how many folks do you know who have engaged in "drunk writing?" This is when you write something when you're drunk but later have only the vaguest recollection of the details of it.

I'll admit to drunk writing a time or two. Beer sometimes makes me want to write poetry, and one night a lot of beer turned into a lot of poetry. I was eventually able to salvage one useable poem from the resulting, rather sophomoric mess. The rest of it was so bad that I took to calling it "anti-poetry." Until I found out that that term already existed.

Yesterday I stumbled upon a story that I "drunk wrote." I'd pretty much forgotten it existed until I saw the title in my "story file" and opened it. Then I remembered, and I remembered that Vodka was the toxin of choice that time. The story is a political satire, politics being something I usually won't touch while sober, and it is both gross and obscene. My problem now is that it's also pretty good. In fact, I was guiltily pleased at how well it turned out.

You might think that having written a decent story would be a good thing, but when I say it is both gross and obscene I mean those words in the way a horror writer would use them. This means that many civilians (non horror readers and writers) will be put off by it. And it's about real people so that makes it worse.

Now I don't know what to do with it. Perhaps I should delete it before I'm tempted to submit it somewhere, or perhaps I should keep it for my own amusement. Or maybe I should let the marketplace decide. One thing for sure, if it's ever published I'll make sure it's under a pseudonym.

And now I'm wondering. What might whiskey do for me?

1 comment:

Sidney said...

My brain kind of shuts down at the center if I've had something to drink. It makes me not want to fully describe things and to otherwise cut corners. There's something to be said for economy but that's not quite what I achive so I try to wait until later if I've had anything. I could see how it would reduce inhibitions in writing horror which could take things to the extreme.