“Write drunk, edit sober.”
That quote, falsely attributed to Ernest Hemingway, is famous for good reason. Not because being drunk helps (it doesn’t), but because the most important constraint you have to remove to create great writing is the worry about your reader. You’re just trying to get from zero to one, to move the idea from the inside to the outside.
When I wrote Good Authority, the first draft I handed my editor was some 70,000 words. The first edit I got back had kept about 15,000 of them, meaning that around 20% was useful—but getting the other 80% out of me was essential to finding the good stuff. I took a breath and got back to work.
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