Internal Editor

My internal editor is always busy.

For me, when I use my MS Word, it is always showing up red squiggly lines that are calling for me to take a look at. I want so much to fix all of those little red squiggly lines, but I’m telling you, for now leave them alone.

When we are writing, and we’re on roll if we hesitate because we see something that needs fixing, we are more than likely going to lose the flow of words and possibly lose sight of the story!
You can go in to the tools, scroll to find options and don’t allow the ‘checking’ of your work. Or you can turn the internal editor off in your mind! Tell yourself that you will not check and re-check until you are completely done so that you can get a good amount of work accomplished in your day. That means tons of writing, whether good, bad or grammatically incorrect!

This doesn’t mean that you can become lazy in your short stories or articles or even your writing prompts. No, for those you WILL need to do a spell check BEFORE you post them so that your peers are seeing your very best work.

Now remember that your spell check does not know the difference between by and buy so you will need to be diligent in reading your own work when your done. Sure the red squiggly lines will show up fixing something like "werd" when you mean "word" but it can not read the writer’s mind. (Don’t we wish?)

Why hasn’t Mister Gates come up with a mind reading device? Why hasn’t the government for that matter? Well I’m glad no one has as of yet because we Americans are lazy enough in letting a microwave cook for us, a clothes dryer dry for us, and now we want a perfect word processor? NO!

This internal editor is normal. Even in my younger years of writing with a pen and paper (I must be old!) I always wanted to use an eraser and fix my error. Then they created pens WITH erasers, and then we were treated to the luxurious white-out for type-written material. All that this did was make us lazy in our writing habits.

What I am saying is, TURN IT OFF! There is no need to fix your work as you are writing because only YOU are going to see it. Let the flow run like a river. Allow your muse to take over the keyboard and keep typing without looking at the screen! That’s an order!

Glance up occasionally to make sure your getting down what you intended, but please don’t go back and fix typographical errors!!! You'll lose site of the natural flow of things.

Be the writer that you know you can be. Treat the art with respect and it will reward YOU with respect in return!

Now stop reading and get back to writing!!!