Shut up, Inner Editor!

Sounds like the same guy who lives in my head. He has more than overstayed his welcome.

It is so hard. You have to write fast, so fast you leave it behind. You gotta remember you can fix it later.

I stabbed him -- that took care of it. NEVER edit during NaNo. I think it's one of the 7 deadly sins.

Headphones, loud music, and racing against the timer on my phone. It's pretty easy to keep them quiet when you're trying for your personal best word count in 20 minutes. (Or however long you want. I just go for 20.)

Told him to feck off, I'd deal with him later. This is my first year doing NaNo. I'm finding it massively liberating just to pour out utter rubbish onto the page.

I listen to him, usually. Every now and then I have to remind him not to be quite so nit-picky, but in general we get along just fine.

Sent her to the beach where she could get those little umbrella drinks and oogle some men. Worked last year--she came back tanned and not nearly so snarky.

This year she wants to go to Paris. Sheesh. Like I'm made of money?

Srsly, I just didn't let myself go back and retype anything I'd already written. If I had an idea, or realized I had to change something, I made a note at the beginning of the chapter in italics and then went back to writing. It got easier to do as the month went on. I finally convinced myself that first drafts could suck and it was ok--I could fix it later. Plus I reminded myself that editing mid-writing was wasted time. I had no idea if I'd have to change a particular scene again, if the plot went left instead of right. So spending NaNo writing time on polishing something that might get thrown out or radically changed was madness.

I promise to listen to her later. It only works some of the time but if I give her five minutes to run wide at the end of my writing session she tends to go easier on me.

Oh, sorry - missed that this was in the Nano thingy. Ignore me...

I promise the biatch that once I have a first draft of the book, she is free to pounce on it and rip it apart.

I'm picking up a WIP I had left several months ago. I read it for the first time since March, so I could remember where I left off, and fought hard not to make any changes. Man, was it hard to resist!

I made a compromise with my inner editor.

I'm allowed to fix spelling mistakes and typos - I'm using a new wireless keyboard which has slightly different spacing to my normal keyboard, and I'm hitting the wrong keys constantly at the moment. If I couldn't correct typos I would have gone mad by now

I'm not allowed to fix wonky grammar, weird expressions, bizarre plot points or OOC characters. That's for December.

So far, the compromise is working out....

This is my biggest problem, NaNo or not. My inner editor cripples me. I'm trying to learn how to shut it off ... not that easy to do, though.

I told my inner editor to shut up and relax yourself, it's only for word count that I'm going on tangents and writing long paragraphs just to get my thoughts down. I promised her that she'll get to come out again in December.

usually it's nearly impossible to get her to shut up, but now that it's just for NaNoWriMo and I'm not even allowing myself to scroll up and read what I previously wrote which actually is really helpful. I know I'm in a time crunch and I need to get a word count in, so it usually shuts up after that. After NaNo, not so much.

My inner editor is pretty strong. Can't help it. The going is much slower than I'd like it to be. (But hopefully it will result in less work later.)

To shut up my inner editor when I did NaNo the past couple years, I set the window of the Word document to as short as possible and very narrow. This way I could only see--for the most part--one sentence. That helped quite a bit until I got used to ignoring errors, then I could open up the window a bit so it wasn't so annoying.

Snowstorm said:

To shut up my inner editor when I did NaNo the past couple years, I set the window of the Word document to as short as possible and very narrow.

Click to expand...

This is a damned good idea. I might give it a go.

Snowstorm said:

To shut up my inner editor when I did NaNo the past couple years, I set the window of the Word document to as short as possible and very narrow. This way I could only see--for the most part--one sentence. That helped quite a bit until I got used to ignoring errors, then I could open up the window a bit so it wasn't so annoying.

Click to expand...

pretty much what I do. or just scroll all the way down so you can only see what you are currently writing.

I thought I'd managed to quash him pretty well, but then he popped back up last night to tell me that when edit mode comes back he's going to insist that I throw out everything I wrote yesterday...

This is my first time at NANO, inner editor is driving me batty. As others have said I'm allowing him to correct misspellings, and basic punctuation, but that's it. Though the threats keep coming, he’s cringing often when a cliché or flat phrase appears.

I will say, each day it’s easier to block him. Ah, the power.

My inner editor refuses to shut up. I only allow myself to make changes to the paragraph that I am working on. I would rather have my inner editor bug me now, rather create double the work when I go back to edit. So the editor stays.

My inner editor only checks into the office when she doesn't have a drink in her hand or something shiny to distract her, so it's not as much of an issue for me.

I got back at the inner editor yesterday by writing two scenes in which no one did anything but argue and severely neglected dialogue tags. He screamed horribly the whole, but I had so much fun.