I forgot about this quote attributed to Hemingway until just now! (I don't think it really matters if he actually said this or if its just apocryphal, because he surely embodied the quote's spirit and I'm fairly sure that was to all humanity's benefit).

Years ago, there was a time before I had read enough of Papa's work to recognize his brilliance. As an obnoxiously arrogant college freshman I actually believed that because I had quickly read For Whom The Bell Tolls on time, I was an expert on Hemingway and could justifiably regard him as "middle-brow." (If I could go back in time I'd have a few things to...forcefully tell that snobby young version of myself).

So, being the "very unique" University First Year that I was, I decided that, obviously, I would show everyone that Hemingway wasn't nearly as clever as I.

"Reverse it," I told all my new friends who were already finding me overbearing enough to audibly groan when I approached them in the quad with my, "I have a paradigm shifting idea that will make you all very impressed with me so much that you won't be able to help but stroke my ego," face.

"Reverse Hemingway's advice and everything you write will be more interesting than Hills Like 'freakin' White Elephants," I said. (How haughty does a kid have to be to add an expletive infix like "freakin" to one of the greatest short stories of all time? I was abso-freakin-lutely the worst).

That afternoon I wrote the assignment for my English 101 class while I was stone-cold sober. It was as terrible as everything else I wrote, but probably passable enough to earn a solid, "B-" by our Professor, who was a notoriously kind grader.

Still, that evenining, thinking I had the solution to not only ace the assignment, but turn my scribbling into a piece of visionary literature, I proceeded to get completely obliterated on Cutty Sark before sitting down to "edit" my work.

I don't recall what happened that night, but was told by my roommates that at around midnight, I had ripped up the only copy of my assignment while babbling about "dialogism" and the superiority of the spoken word to the written. They then took me out to a bar (because they were both amazing and awful friends) and I ended up getting socked in the mouth by a defensive end on the football team.

As you can see, most of my flaws as an author remain into the present day. I'm still overly verbose, long-winded, and incapable of self-censoring on the fly.

But since that day I have never, ever edited anything after even a single drink.

And I still do most of my writing on about five fingers of Wild Turkey.

Speaking of...

Thanks for the inspiration to some amazing memories!