evidence: If literary geniuses wrote drunk, why can’t we? [...] I don’t drink when I have to read half a novel in the span of the night or comb through research databases anymore. It’s only when the words won’t come to me. Something about drinking makes my words come out cleaner, more poetic. I’m better — more sure of my words, more settled with my ideas — when I drink. Editing the next day is the worst part, combing through typos in the main text and tangents I couldn’t work into the draft. In a misquote attributed to the esteemed Ernest Hemingway and abused by college students everywhere — "write drunk, edit sober." [...] If the hallowed halls of the literary canon can write drunk, I thought I should, too. I don’t know if I think that anymore. I thought they were great when they were drunk, but it doesn’t make me feel any better writing with a glass in my hand. Maybe they were great outside of their problems. Maybe they were just complicated people, and we make them into something bigger than any one person can really be.