Writing Drunk, Editing Sober (Sort Of)

What Bukowski Taught Me About First-Draft Wildness

There’s a quote often attributed to Hemingway… “Write drunk, edit sober.” Whether he actually said it or not doesn’t matter. What matters is the idea underneath it, the permission it gives you to write like a maniac and worry about coherence later.

Bukowski understood this instinctively. Not because he was always drunk (though, let’s be honest, he often was), but because he wrote with a kind of feral abandon that most of us have trained ourselves out of by the time we’re old enough to care about our “personal brand.”

I’ve been thinking about this a lot lately. About the way I used to write before I knew what I was doing, before I’d read all the craft books and taken all the courses and learned all the rules about hooks and value propositions and audience avatars. Back then, I just wrote. Sometimes it was brilliant. More often it was shit. But it was alive in a way that my carefully optimised content rarely is.

The Problem with Sobriety

Here’s what happens when you start taking writing seriously: you begin editing before you’ve even finished the sentence. You second-guess every word. You wonder if this will resonate with your audience, if it’s on-brand, if it’s too much or not enough or too weird or not weird enough.

You become sober too soon.

And sobriety, in writing, is often just fear dressed up as professionalism. It’s the voice that says, “You can’t say that.” “That’s too honest.” “Nobody wants to read about that.” “What will people think?”

Bukowski didn’t seem to have that voice. Or if he did, he told it to fuck off.

His first drafts probably were his final drafts, or close to it. He wrote the way he lived… impulsively, messily, without asking permission. And yes, sometimes that meant his work was uneven, repetitive, and self-indulgent. But it also meant it had a pulse. It felt like a real human had written it, not a content strategist optimising for engagement metrics.

The Wildness We’ve Lost

I remember writing my first proper essay years ago. I sat down, angry about something I can’t even remember now, and just… vomited words onto the page. No outline. No plan. Just pure, unfiltered reaction.

When I read it back, it was a mess. But buried in that mess were three sentences that were the truest things I’d written in months. Sentences I never would have found if I’d been “writing properly.”

That’s the thing about first-draft wildness… it bypasses all the clever parts of your brain, the parts that know how things are supposed to sound, and goes straight to the truth. The weird, uncomfortable, sometimes embarrassing truth.

Bukowski’s work is full of those moments. The times he admits to being petty, jealous, scared. The times he describes something ugly without trying to make it beautiful. The times he just… says the thing everyone’s thinking but nobody’s supposed to say.

And we love him for it. Not despite the messiness, but because of it.

The Tyranny of Editing

Don’t get me wrong… editing matters. I’m not suggesting we all publish our stream-of-consciousness nonsense and call it art. Bukowski, for all his chaos, had an ear for rhythm and an eye for detail that came from years of practice.

But here’s what I’ve noticed: the more I edit, the safer my writing becomes. The sharper edges get filed down. The strange metaphors get replaced with sensible ones. The personal anecdotes that felt too revealing get cut entirely.

By the time I’m “done,” I’ve often edited out everything that made it worth writing in the first place.

This is what I mean by “sort of” when I say edit sober. Yes, you need to cut the bits that don’t work, fix the bits that confuse, shape the thing into something a reader can follow. But you also need to protect the wildness. The parts that came from somewhere primal and true.

Bukowski knew this. He let the rough edges stay rough. He didn’t polish everything into gleaming, professional prose. He left the fingerprints on it.

Permission to Be Messy

What I’ve learned from reading Bukowski… and from years of trying to write like someone I’m not… is that first-draft wildness isn’t a problem to be fixed. It’s the whole point.

That feeling when you’re writing and you don’t know where you’re going but the words are pouring out anyway? That’s not a bug. That’s the only thing worth chasing.

The trick is learning to recognise what’s wild and true versus what’s just indulgent and pointless. And yes, that takes sobriety. That takes editing. But it also takes protecting the parts that scare you a little, the parts that feel too honest or too strange.

Those are the parts people will remember.

How This Actually Works

So here’s what I try to do now, when I’m writing anything that matters:

First draft: no rules. No stopping. No second-guessing. Just get it out. If it wants to go somewhere weird, let it. If it wants to be angry or vulnerable or completely off-topic, fine. This is the drunk part, except I’m usually sober and just caffeinated beyond reason.

Then I walk away. Sometimes for an hour. Sometimes for a day. I need distance before I can see what’s actually there.

Second draft: this is where I put on my editor hat and ask, “What’s this really about?” Usually, I’ve written three different essays tangled together. I pull them apart, see which one has the most life in it, and follow that thread.

Third draft: ruthless cuts. Anything that’s just clever for the sake of clever. Anything that’s self-conscious or trying too hard. Anything that sounds like it came from a writing course rather than from me.

But… and this is crucial… I protect the weird bits. The bits that make me nervous. The bits that feel too personal or too raw or too much. Those usually stay.

What Bukowski Actually Taught Me

It’s not about being drunk or chaotic or deliberately provocative. It’s about trusting the part of you that writes before you’ve had time to think about what you’re writing.

It’s about giving yourself permission to be a mess in the first draft, because that mess is where the truth lives.

And it’s about being brave enough to let some of that mess survive into the final draft, even when the professional, sensible part of your brain is screaming at you to make it safer.

Most writing advice will tell you to polish everything until it shines. Bukowski would tell you to leave the dirt on it. Let people see where it came from.

I’m still learning how to do this. Still fighting the urge to sand everything down until it’s acceptable and professional and utterly forgettable.

But the writing I’m proudest of? It’s always the stuff that scared me a little to publish. The stuff that still has some wildness in it.

That’s the Bukowski lesson. Not “write drunk.” But “write wild, and don’t edit all the life out of it.”

The rest is just grammar.

Until Next Time