I want to caution others not to think of this as advice or even a suggestion because, as we all know, alcohol does different things to different people. For me, however, one of its values is that it turns me into a brutal critic and detailed editor of my own work. This does not, I should point out, hold true for editing the work of others, which I do rather brutally as a matter of course without the benefit of alcohol. But for some reason, after a couple of glasses of wine, I tend to find all manner of unnecessary words, phrases and ideas to cut from my prose, and when I compare early drafts to those edited “under the influence” so to speak, I find that the editing enhanced, rather than detracted, from the readability and precision of the writing.
This phenomenon puzzles me a bit, because alcohol generally has the effect of making a person less inhibited and more convinced (though often falsely) of their own veracity and skills. In my case, however, not only am I able to be severely critical of myself as a writer, but can see technical flaws and typos that I seem to pass over when completely sober. I do not, by the way, ever drink to excess; I never get drunk or have hangovers. In fact, I drink wine cut by half with water, much as parents in Europe do when allowing their children to have wine with meals. Still, even this small level of alcohol consumption seems to be enough to enhance my ability to be critical of, and effectively edit, my own writing.
