For a fiction workshop back in college I was having the hardest damned time coming up with anything one night--it wasn't even a story, just a little project to get us thinking, but one which I had to read to the class the next day. Somewhere after midnight I decided I was a failure and the only solution was the immediate application of alcohol, which I set to with a vengeance. And what do you know! The piece wrote itself.

I woke up remembering none of the specifics of what I'd written, but feeling it had been funny and insightful. I reread it to confirm my genius and was.. slightly panicked when I realized it was incoherent gabbling. For some reason I decided to go to class anyway, and spent the first ten minutes crossing out every other line and scrabbling to make any kind of sense out of the prior night's channeling of Dionysus. I got rid of the most embarrassing stuff, but I can say with confidence it was still a complete and utter disaster. The end result of this was a strict and immediate creation of an identical "Don't Drink and Write" policy.

Took me about three years to challenge that rule. I still don't write much when I've been drinking, as I find it to be windy (even moreso than usual) and meandering, which produces some useful first draft material but leads to about three times as much stuff that just has to be cut. Makes me wonder how guys like Bukowski and Faulker pulled it off--and whether they spent their hangovers editing.