Internal Editor

It is perfectly okay to write garbage – as long as you edit brilliantly.
C. J. Cherryh

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Now this has happened to all of us writers at one time or another in our writing career. We open our workspace (document) to write, begin writing, and see a typo or something else that catches our eye, we go back to fix it and do that down the entire page, and realize the entire five hundred words were led by...our internal editor.

As much as I hate to admit it, editing has hindered my writing on more than one occasion. I don’t just mean a proofreading of my work; finding the misplaced comma, grammatical errors, typos and such. I mean editing to where I rewrite a sentence, place a more heavily understood metaphor in its place; trashing an entire sentence and rewriting it to where it looks and sounds right. This has been me on more than one occasion.

I’m here to tell you to shut it off!!! You can not get anything accomplished if you’re always looking back over your shoulder to see the trail (mess) that you leave behind. We must always look ahead and embrace whatever we must at that place in time. Writing is like the long journey which we trek down in life; we’re always doubting, shaking our head, often trying to fix the wrongs and make them right, and how successful was THAT? Impossible!

As writers we always try to fix the wrongs as we’re writing and that is just plain futile! It gets you nowhere and certainly doesn’t keep you writing. I’ll let you in on a little secret. It might not be a secret, maybe all writers have found this morsel as they grow as a writer.

1. Open your document and turn spellcheck off!!!
2. Start writing and DON’T look up at the screen!
3. Don’t stop until you feel that you’ve hit 500 words, AT LEAST!

Okay, now you can look up at the mess, I mean writing. If this is enough writing for you. Stop and fix. If you’re writing a short story, look back down at the keys and begin writing again, another five hundred words. Keep doing this until you’re done for the day and you’ve accomplished what you came for.

Don’t allow your internal editor to tell you what to do! Too often we listen to others around us or that small voice inside, and we’re ready to listen to it too, because we always think it to be right. Well I’m here to tell you the truth. Nine times out of ten, that voice is wrong and just wants to confuse you and lead you astray. Know anyone like that?

I grew up in a household full of negativity and had to teach myself how to break free from that scary inner voice and listen to the one true voice that God gave me. One Voice- one truth. Remember that! As you’re writing and the voice says, ‘that’s no good! You stink.’ Turn it around and repeat after me, ‘MY WORK IS GOOD! Not GREAT BUT GOOD!!!’

As you continue to feed a positive affirmation to the mix, the negative voice sounds like a muffled taped-mouth voice! Eventually ONE VOICE will win, and it won’t be that lackey the internal editor!

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!!!