The Problems and Uses of an Internal Editor

Every writer has things they allow to keep themselves from writing. One of the most common is the internal critic or internal editor – that voice in one’s head that picks apart one’s work, pointing at all the things that are wrong with it, from typos and misplaced commas to major plot holes and lapses in characterization.

There are thousands of writing blog posts dedicated to silencing your internal editor, many with completely contradictory advice. One of the ones I found was phrased as a list of orders – outline everything, never reread until the draft is finished, set word-count goals; another extolled the virtue of doing one’s first drafts as a series of timed freewriting stints – absolutely no outlining or planning ahead, no word-count goals, just set a timer for ten minutes and write as fast as possible without stopping until it goes off. The one thing almost all of them have in common is the assumption that the Internal Editor is a bad, bad thing that will keep you from writing.

This assumption is, in my opinion, wrongheaded.

The Internal Editor is the part of your psyche that evaluates your writing. It’s where your standards live. It’s the voice that looks at a sentence like “Hopefully, George had went, left but to find Jane makes the choice wrong soonly” and says “Argh! Grammar! Syntax! Punctuation! Clarity! No, no, no!” until you change it to “George had gone left, hoping to find Jane, but soon discovered that he had made the wrong choice.” You need this ability if you’re going to do an effective job of presenting your stories.

What you don’t need is an internal voice that fights with your process, sabotages your confidence, or out-and-out gives you bad advice. These problems can and do crop up at any stage of a writer’s career, and most of them have their roots in one of two things: either the writer is giving primacy to what ought to be mainly a support function, and it’s mucking up their production, or else there’s a significant mismatch between the writer’s writing skills and their editing skills.

Evaluation and editing are skills that are utterly useless without something to edit. That’s why I label it a support function. In business terms, it’s part of Quality Control, not Production. It’s a really, really important part of writing, but it isn’t the story. When a writer puts too much emphasis on evaluation – on getting each and every sentence “right” before moving on to the next one – the editing process takes over from the writing process, and the writing process slows to a crawl and eventually stops. When a writer puts too little emphasis on evaluation, they risk producing a word salad that is incomprehensible even to them.

Part of the trouble is that “too much emphasis” varies depending on the writer and his/her process. Some writers need to slow down and write a fairly polished paragraph before they feel they have a firm enough foundation to move on to the next one. Others need to get the ideas and the flow down fast, before they lose them; fixes and expansion and clarification can come later. In either case, getting the balance wrong disrupts the writer’s process – the one who needs a polished paragraph loses confidence if they completely turn off the editor and try the “never reread, never look back, not until the whole first draft is written” advice; the one who needs to get things down in a rush gets stalled if they don’t turn their editor way down during their first pass.

The other trouble is that writers are predisposed toward perfectionism, because the first books we read – and most of the ones we love – shape our idea of what “good writing” is … and all those books are finished, polished, fully-edited end products, not first drafts. It takes conscious effort to keep oneself from expecting to write a rough draft that reads as smoothly and that is as polished as one’s favorite novel. Obviously, the only way to get a polished and edited rough draft is to do a lot of editing during the drafting process…which is “too much emphasis” in nearly every case.

The other root cause of Internal Editor problems comes when the writer’s ability to evaluate their own work critically is either much better or much worse than their writing skill. The former is much more obvious – and more obviously troublesome – than the latter. A high-Internal-Editor/lower-writing-skills pairing has the same effect as putting too much emphasis on evaluation during the drafting process; the only differences are that this will stall even writers who need a polished foundation to move forward, and that it is harder to turn down or shut off because it’s not as conscious or deliberate a process. The low-Internal-Editor/higher-writing-skills writer has much less trouble getting a draft down, but can have far more difficulty in seeing and fixing even quite serious problems, and almost always has difficulty when tackling a stretchy project, because they can’t see where the potholes are.

Solving the mismatch in skill levels can only be done by improving whichever is the weaker skill until things are back in balance. Ideally, writing progress would be a see-saw, where one’s writing skills improve a little, and then one’s critical skills improve a little, and then the writing, and so on. In practice, it’s never that neat and tidy.

Writing skills are improved by writing with intent. Intent can come in the form of outside constraints – writing classes, critique groups, and exercises in specific areas that one has identified as things one wants to improve – or by deliberately working on a stretchy project that requires a higher level of performance in some area (using a type of viewpoint or structure that one hasn’t tried before, for instance). Internal Editors are educated through a combination of  1) the writing rules people are taught in school (and later pick up from how-to-write books and blogs), 2) the observations, conscious or unconscious, that the writer makes when reading books they love, and 3) practicing on other people’s work – i.e., participating in a critique group (or certain kinds of book clubs). Again, working on this skill deliberately, with intent, is probably the fastest way to fix an unbalanced skill set.