Welcome to the very first issue of Drunk Writing Advice!

I never do this (I literally get a stomach ache when I think about talking to a camera), but I wanted to kick things off with a little video for y’all:

This newsletter has 4 segments, designed to be ultra digestible, and highly actionable:

✏️ Sentence School: Concise and practical lessons on topics ranging from authentic writing, to riveting storytelling, to publishing your shit online — and maybe even a wildcard from time to time.

🥃 The Writer’s Pour: Exercises or assignments for you to immediately put what you just learned into practice. (It’s homework that works for you.)

🎙️ Drunk Talk: A peek behind the curtain on the creation of Drunk Business Advice. What I struggled with, how I overcame it, and what I learned. And how much I drank in the process. 🤦 

🤖 Robot Pals: Real-world examples of how I used AI to help with my writing that week.

As we roll along, I’ll probably experiment with different segments, and even a deep-dive from time to time. And those experiments will be signaled by YOU! So if there’s something you want to see, hit reply, and let me know. ❤️ 

In the meantime, remember this mantra:

🍻 In this week’s issue of Drunk Writing Advice:

✏️ Sentence School: The psychology behind why stories stick.

🥃 The Writer’s Pour: Exercises to help you infuse context, emotion, and meaning into boring, flat facts.

🎙️ Drunk Talk: I’m not happy with what I sent out on Sunday…

🤖 Robot Pals: AI helped me finish a joke.

Why stories stick

For early humans, stories weren’t entertainment, history lessons, or vapid LinkedIn tropes — they were life or death warnings. 👇️ 

• FACT: "Red mushrooms are dangerous."

• STORY: "Your uncle ate a red mushroom, shat his pants, fell to the ground, and never woke up."

Which one are you more likely to remember?

Humans are simply not designed to remember isolated facts — we’re wired for stories.

(I wonder how many uncles keeled over before we figured that one out.)

Our brains have evolved to process and recall stories above facts because stories provide context, emotion, and meaning — which are all essential for retention.

But what’s actually going on here?

1. Context is a velcro wall

We remember f*ck-all if we don’t have something to “stick” it to in our brain. It’s the very basis of how learning works… you can’t master long division until you understand multiplication tables.

But what can you do if you want your audience to remember a fact, not learn math?

👉️ You wrap that fact in a story.

Stories create a giant velcro wall in your audience’s brain for the facts to stick to. Without a story to create context around a random fact, it’ll just crash to the floor.

1. Emotions are memory glue

Facts are flat. Stories are felt.

(Seriously. It’s called the the “mirror neuron effect” if you wanna look it up.)

So when your audience experiences a strong emotion from one of your stories, their brains prioritize those memories for easier recall. This is why most TED Talks begin with the speaker’s dramatic origin story — they want you to remember them.

3. And none of that matters without meaning

Humans are pattern-seeking creatures. Neurologically speaking, we’re constantly trying to connect the dots, even when there aren’t any damn dots to connect. (That’s how conspiracy theories are born. 🙄 )

So when you’re wrapping your facts into a story, what you’re actually doing is offering a pre-packaged moral framework that tells the reader: “Here’s why this fact matters.”

How nice of you! 👏 

Dive into some exercises to put what you’ve just learned about the psychology of storytelling into practice. 👇️ 

Here’s an example…

Here’s an example…

I’m not getting paid to write a goddamn love letter…

On Sunday, I published my “love letter to New York” as this week’s issue of Drunk Business Advice.

The point of the story was to celebrate my 20 years in NYC by traveling back to the relentless grind of my first year in the city, and trying to uncover some meaning in it all. That sounds fine on the surface, but here’s the problem when you’re a solo-publisher (like me):

I don’t have an editor to tell me when I’m getting too extraneous, too flowery, or too bloody self-indulgent. I have to be my own editor.

And while I often do a pretty good job of stepping away from a story as a writer, and re-approaching it as an editor, that process requires something I didn’t give myself this week—

Time. ⏰ 

Drunk Business Advice goes out on Sunday mornings. I had been working on this story for a couple of weeks, but I didn’t prioritize it, and assumed it would come easily once I sat down to finish it. It didn’t. And late Saturday night, I was struggling to craft an ending that would weave a through-line (which our pattern-seeking brains love) into everything I had written so far.

But the story didn’t need an amazing ending. It needed a re-write. And I had run out of time. So I published what I had.

But if I could go back with a red pen…

• I’d totally cut everything about the St. George. That entire 400-word section was born from me wanting to write poetically about a smelly building with a cool history. It’s not relevant.
  

• I spent way too much time talking about why I was broke. Frankly, I did that to protect my parent’s feelings. But that’s not a good enough reason to include 200 words of extraneous backstory.
  

• And since I wasted so many words on the St. George shit, and irrelevant personal backstory elements, I didn’t have any space to build the bridge between “struggling kid on the verge of both starvation and a nervous breakdown” to “confident woman who owns this f*cking city”. And that’s where the meat of the story really lives.

Not every story hits the way it should. And while I personally feel like Sunday’s issue of Drunk Business Advice was a miss, I received a bunch of replies from people who connected with the struggle I had as a teen. They felt seen.

So remember:

Sticking to a schedule, and forcing yourself to publish something (even if you’re not happy with it) will not only give you the reps you need to become a great writer — you might just make a positive impact on someone’s day. ❤️ 

I need a punchline…

I use AI every damn day. My go-to tools are ChatGPT (I’ve stuck with it because I’ve now been using it for years, so it has a lot of history on me), and Lex for when I want to access all of the different LLMs, like Claude and Perplexity.

AI never writes for me, but it’s a pretty flawless “writer’s assistant”. So if you’re not using it, you’re missing out — big time.

In this final section, I’ll share examples of how I’ve used AI to write Drunk Business Advice faster, with more voice, and with greater ease.

Since this first issue is already running a little long, I’m just going to provide one of many examples of how I used AI this week—

To finish a joke. 😜 

Everyone knows that if you ask AI to tell a joke, you’ll get crap. AI isn’t funny on it’s own. But it can help you find the right words for a joke that you’ve already structured. 👇️ 

In this case, I already knew that I wanted this joke to exploit the irony between the examples of actual important life milestones (getting married & retiring), and something frivolously important to a kid in the 90s. But my brain just wasn’t giving me any frivolous 90s milestones that worked for the joke.

So I turned to ChatGPT. 👇️ 

I don’t take my place in your inbox for granted.

It’s an honor to be welcomed into your world, and I know I have to work to continue to earn it, week after week. So if you have feedback, or if there’s a topic you want me to cover, just hit reply and tell me!

And if you love Drunk Writing Advice, consider sharing it with a friend. 🥰