Some Things To Do about the Internal Editor

The two problems with the Internal Editor that I mentioned last post boil down to these:

1. The thing it has flagged as a problem is something that doesn’t have a clear right/wrong answer (unlike grammar or spelling rules, for instance). Yet the writer accepts the Internal Editor’s judgement because it has been right so often in the past.
2. The thing it has flagged is clearly a problem – that is, the writer agrees with the Internal Editor – but the writer has no idea how to fix it because their Internal Creative doesn’t have nearly as much experience with fixing as the I.E. has with finding mistakes.

These two are mainly the result of the amount of credibility the Internal Editor has earned from being right in the past. To them, I add a third problem:

3. The writer gets caught up in finding and fixing errors at the expense of everything else that goes into writing a story.

Any and all of these problems can result in a dramatic slow-down of forward progress, or even bring on the complete stoppage known as “writer’s block.” So what does one do about it?

The first thing is to recognize that the Internal Editor is not an enemy. In its proper place, it is a vital part of the writing process … but its proper place is rarely in the drafting stage. (I say “rarely” because there are writers who really do have to get it right the first time – their words set up like concrete once they’ve been away from them for even a short time. This is not, however, the same thing as saying “some writers find revising really hard to do,” because that’s true of nearly everyone.)

So one of the first things one can do about the Internal Editor is to separate the “drafting phase” from the “editing phase.” Instead of allowing, or trying, to do both things at once (or stopping to fix stuff while in mid-flow), one rattles on with as few pauses as possible, making the occasional mark to indicate what will need to be fixed later. I generally use a [ because that is a mark I don’t ever need in the course of writing fiction; I use it to mark things I want to look up later, like the correct adjectival form of “adopt,” or places where I’ve used a similar or identical word twice in two sentences, but I don’t want to stop and mull over alternatives.

One can then either save all the fixing for the second draft, or one can use fixing up yesterday’s brackets as the warm-up for today’s writing session. If I’m using fixes as a warm-up, I sometimes have to make a rule that I can only fix things that I have already marked with a [. If I find something else I want to change, I have to mark it and save it for the next day. This generally happens when I catch myself using my “fix-it warmup” as procrastination instead of as the warm-up it’s supposed to be.

Putting off fixes until a (well-defined) later point is most useful for problem #3. It short-circuits the problem of making endless revisions but no forward progress, because one isn’t allowing oneself to do the revisions until the whole draft is done. It can also be helpful with #1, as putting off the decision on problems with no right answer allows one’s backbrain to mull them over.

Problem #2 – the imbalance between the Internal Editor and the Internal Creative – has one ultimate fix:  Write more. Lots more, until the creative-writing part is back in balance with the editing part. There are a couple of ways to approach this, however, and none of them are either short or painless.

The first is the “million words of crap” approach – accepting the notion that one is going to be producing work that isn’t very good by your own standards, whatever those are, and doing it anyway, while trying to stretch and improve with every new project. This obviously takes a while; even if you are an insanely fast typist, and can compose equally fast, it is going to take a good long while to produce a million words.

Everything else boils down to different methods of training yourself to write better (by your standards) first drafts. As with writing itself, every method works well for some writers and not so well for others, so every writer has to figure out for themselves what works and what doesn’t.

Some writers begin with homage or pastiche – a conscious and deliberate imitation of their favorite author(s). I’m not talking about fanfiction here (though that is also a starting point for many writers); I’m talking about setting out to produce a story in Dorothy Sayers’ style, voice, and structure … and then another one that’s exactly like a William Faulkner story, and then one that could be mistaken for Heinlein, or Bujold, or Tolkein, or Austen. At the very least, trying to do this will let you know what you need to work on (hint: it’s the part you love the best in your favorite works, but have the most difficulty in duplicating to your satisfaction).

Other writers find targeted exercises the way to go. Officially setting out to write an exercise (or do an experiment) allows many writers to turn off, or at least turn down, their Internal Editor, because what they’re doing isn’t supposed to be a perfect finished work; it’s just supposed to educate their Internal Creative.

Effectively using exercises depends on knowing that you need to work on dialog, or structure, or action, or characterization, and then hunting up or inventing writing exercises that work those muscles. I’ve even run across a couple of people who sat down and copied (by hand, not typing) works by their favorite authors as a way of training their backbrains to make better choices. Alternatively, I met one writer who advocated reading a story, writing a plot summary of it a day or two later (without looking at it again), writing a story from their plot summary (still without looking at the original), and then comparing their work with the original.

But the most effective way I have found of shutting off the Internal Editor is production. Human brains aren’t meant to do more than one thing at a time. If I am focused on getting the scene down, I don’t have any spare brain cells to spend on critiquing it. Telling myself that I’ll edit later is the way I get started; once I get going, it’s easier to keep going than it is to stop and tidy something up.

Forward momentum is a wonderful thing.