Turning off the internal editor

...how do you do it?

Mine's pernicious. Sometimes I think I've gotten rid of her, only to look up and find I've spent five minutes of my oh-so-limited writing time jiggering around with a single sentence. Moving a word here, a comma there. Moving it from the end of the paragraph to the beginning. Chopping out an adverb, adding in an adjective, changing gerunds to past tense... argh!

I've set myself a pretty low daily goal, given myself weekends off, done everything I can to chain up the inner control freak. I tell myself -- constantly -- to fix it in revisions, for now just worry about getting it down on the page. But I can't seem to switch out of "audiencing" mode, where I'm not in my character's head or even my own head - I'm in the head of the Gentle Reader, judging every word, tsking mournfully aloud at random intervals.

Two things help -- journaling daily, which gives me practice just writing down random things that I know nobody else is ever going to read, and loud music played while I'm writing, which often seems to occupy my internal editor long enough for me to sneak in a decent word count.

Any other ideas?

Thanks for the replies everybody - it's good to hear other people's stories and ideas.

And Neuro - the "internal editor" is just a metaphor for my neurosis, not an actual psychotic break - but we're totally agreed on the self-discipline. For the past year I've worked from home (I succeeded in moving from Chicago to Boston, but failed in quitting my job), so that's a muscle I've had to learn to flex on a regular basis. But I find it's easier to call up a sense of discipline when there's a deadline or a paycheck on the table.

I guess my challenge is to learn to bring it when I want it, not just when I need it.

Now that I've seen so many responses, I realize I forgot to mention the one thing that helps me the most -- planning.

I'm not a planner by nature, I'm way more likely to just sit down at the keyboard and see what happens. And when I do that, sometimes things flow so easily and well that the internal editing just never happens; it's a great feeling.

The problem is, sometimes when I do that, things don't flow easily, and instead I sit at the end of a sentence with no idea what to do next. That's when futzing around with that previous sentence becomes so attractive -- and the sentence before it, and the paragraph before that, etc.

So one of the things I've started doing is taking a walk before my dedicated writing time - no iPod, no company. I use that time to set some goals for the next few hours, and then fiddle around with flourishes and dialogue in my head. That way, when I get to the computer, I have a far better chance of writing through the tough parts than if I'd never considered what to do if inspiration failed to show up for its appointment.

Unfortunately for me, it's been a cold, rainy, grim weekend in New England - so no walks for me. But I've got a new elliptical showing up today, and once we get that put together, maybe my self-discipline will be a little less weather-dependent.