As a writer, my inner editor is my best friend when I’m doing revisions. But it can be a demon during a first draft.
For years, I started several things and never finished any of them. I’d get five or ten or even fifty pages in and decide it was all garbage and start over. Then I finally decided that was enough of that. So, when I started THE SHAMAN’S CURSE, I made myself a rule: I couldn’t go back and change anything until I had finished the whole thing. I could make notes in the margins about what I wanted to change, but I couldn’t actually edit anything until it was complete. I probably only managed to stick to this rule because I wrote THE SHAMAN’S CURSE long hand in several spiral notebooks. It’s just harder to go back and tweak things that way. I only broke this rule twice, when it was obvious that I had gone down a false trail and the only way to move forward was to go back a little.
I’ve outgrown the spiral notebooks, but it looks like I might need to remind myself of that rule. After writing about 6,500 new words, I’ve been stuck for several days on the new chapters for DREAMER’S ROSE. I know exactly why; I don’t like the last part I wrote. There’s too much telling. Either I need to find a way to show these things or they’re not important enough to keep. Since they go to my antagonist’s personality and motives, I think they probably are important enough to show. I just don’t have a good handle on the scenes to do that right now.
So, the answer is, to remember that at least this part of the book is still a first draft. I need to turn that little demon of an inner editor off, make a note, and just move on. I can fix it in the revisions. That’s what they’re for.
Meredith Mansfield, Author 
I agree, Meredith. I played trumpet for about twelve years semi-professionally. I would spend a lot of time practicing – not just a piece of music, but various techniques I needed proficiency in. These trained a reflexive behaviour so that when playing, no thought was required. And the last thing I could afford to do when performing was to stop, back up, and get it right again. I just had to keep going.
I liken writing to that exact same performance process – much repeated critiquing and editing teaches the brain to write prose with little conscious thought. Nevertheless when we are drafting, we’re performing, and when we hit a wrong note we just keep going.
Though as you say, there are exceptions. But the more exceptions we let ourselves make, the closer we come to walking offstage and never coming back. And after all: unlike the music business we can go back and polish it up after the fact.
Handy, that.
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Thanks. I like the music analogy.
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Hey Meredith,
I find after editing a story or a short that I have a hard time writing freestyle afterward, but I keep in mind that I will edit the heck out of it later on, so I have to trust myself to catch the errors I know I’m making. But I just plow ahead in order to get the essence of the story down.
My worst enemy is POV. I’ll have a character think something when it’s not their turn to be thinking, but I type it anyway because I figure it’s letting me get to know them better in the long run.
The hard part is finding all the “he thought”s afterward because once I get used to seeing it, it tends to stay that way. =)
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