Editing on Wine

I will preface this post by saying I'm not a wine drinker. I don't even really like wine, but yesterday I found it to be my only option, so I poured myself a glass and set to work editing my novel.

My advice to authors is, don't do that. I have no idea what changes I made to my draft, and I don't think I'm eager to find out.

Occasionally someone online will ask other writers if they indulge in alcohol when they're writing. I personally have no problem with it. While I'm not willing to become an alcoholic to advance my writing career, I find that when I sit down to write, having a drink loosens my inhibitions and releases those creative enzymes. I fully admit that I've written some really good scenes while imbibing. Just not while imbibing on wine. I'm unused to it and was obviously not acquainted with the effect it would have on me. 

My editing session began innocently enough. I continued tinkering with my Texas scenes, which were clearly missing something. I decided the problem was that my main character could have been anywhere, as little local color as I added. I do this a lot. I will use a place or even another character as a launching pad, and I really don't care about them except for their usefulness in advancing the plot. But, you know, readers like to be grounded in a...blah blah blah, so I'll need to force myself to do a bit of research in order to add a couple distinguishing markers. 

While that still hasn't happened, I rewrote a passage that made my MC look like she had learned nothing from her past mistakes. Her prior relationship had broken up because she failed to divulge to her love interest that she was a professional singer. (It didn't matter what she failed to divulge; just that she kept an important part of her life secret from him.) Now, with the new love interest, she'd done the exact same thing; hid something important from him. So I changed that. She was coming off as just a sneaky liar. Well, now he knows everything. 

After that I kept going. When I first introduced the superstar character, she wasn't going to be a major player in the story. While I got a lot about her right, I portrayed her as a real potty-mouth. That would have been okay if she only appeared once, but it turned off-putting and tiresome after a while. Plus, the vulgar language overpowered the fun of her dialogue, which later became hilariously colloquial. I had so much fun inventing things for her to say that made little-to-no sense to anyone she was talking to, but still managed to get her point across. So now, every time I ran across an uttered obscenity, I changed it to something sweetly silly.   

But after my second glass of wine, I lost the thread, and this is where I have lost any recollection of what I changed or added or deleted. The readback should be "fun".

If a writer chooses to drink while writing, a couple of rules need to be observed. Number one, stick with a beverage you're used to; and two, recognize your cutoff point. 

Yesterday cemented my decision to never touch wine again. Really. The thought of it makes me physically sick. Plus, it's impossible to drink away my editing dread. The wine was no help with that whatsoever. Editing has to be done, and neither alcohol nor caffeine...nor milk will make it any less agonizing.