I like a good red. A half-glass of the smoothest pinot-noir, sipped slow, flavouring long and pleasant conversation, is a joy. But, like Hemingway, to whom the drunk and sober maxim of my title is wrongly attributed (apparently Peter De Vries holds claim), and who wrote sober, despite being a heavy drinker, I don’t write drunk. Caffeine is my drug of choice. Otherwise, a brew of Bengal Spice, imbibed throughout an afternoon of writing, ensures safe passage to Parnassus.
I do edit sober. Very sober. Now that I have a working draft of By Violence Unavenged, it’s time to take the manuscript to the writer’s Underworld for judgement and pitiless analysis; to question commas and characters; to test every word and phrase, and wage war on imagery. A hellish task it is indeed.
Tools help, however. I recommend Hemingway as a valuable app to hone expression. It assesses the readability of your manuscript, spots those pesky ‘-ly’ adverbs, identifies linguistic complications, and highlights sentences which might benefit from simplification. And I am quite pleased with the changes made so far. By shouldering the responsibility of identifying problems, Hemingway has freed me to make the critical creative decisions required to improve the text.
A basic edit for expression is but the beginning. I’ll edit By Violence Unavenged in multiple ways: there’s the character edit (for each character, that is), the chronology edit, the historical accuracy edit, the thematic edit, the motif edit… and so on… and so on… until I will be crying for Pinot Noir.
Between times, I play Beethoven.