I can’t even tell you the struggles I’ve had the last few weeks. I’ve been cranking out enormous word counts, but they’re mostly rough drafts. I’ve been staying away from final drafts, because I just keep thinking, “I’m not doing this right. I’m not doing this right. They’ll all know I’m a fraud.”
If you’ve been a writer for long, you know that there are weeks like this. Sometimes there are whole months or years (God forbid) when the voices keep talking to us, stealing our courage. Your characters aren’t developed enough, they say. Your plot line sags in the middle, they say. Why in the world would you choose that point of view? they say.
Those internal editors can be a drag. I’ve gotten really good at ignoring them on the first drafts of my stories and essays, because all I’m really trying to do is get all my words down on a page without logical organization or readability per se. Sometimes I use abbreviations or the completely wrong word with an asterisk behind it because I’m just trying to get the words on the page, as fast as I can. When I need a new name for someone or I’m writing about a new place, I’ll often put a line where the name should be, because I don’t even stop long enough to figure out what I’d like to call it.
This works for me, because I’m getting words down on a page crazy fast. It’s why I can write 6,000 words in an hour and a half. It’s how I log an average of 40,000 words in a week of only 20 writing hours.
Not so for final drafts. Last week I blocked out three hours to begin writing the final drafts of episodes one and two of my Fairendale series. It took me a whole three hours to write about 3,000 words.
Part of it is because, up until now, I’ve written all my other novels in first person point of view. The Fairendale series is told by an omniscient narrator, which I have never actually done before. So I’m trying to get it right, and the entire time I’m trying to get it right, that pesky internal editor has been bothering me. “You’re not getting it right. They’re all going to hate this,” he says.
And I’ve believed him. I’ve wanted to quit writing the story altogether. And I would if there weren’t a lot of people (mostly my mom) who are really excited about this series and can’t wait to read it when I finally release it. That makes me want to finish it. It also makes me feel pressure to get it exactly right. I’m a perfectionist. I try to make everything 100 percent, even if people would be perfectly fine reading a story at 80 percent.
Internal editors can come to us at different stages in the process. Sometimes they come to us between the first and second drafts. Sometimes they come to us during the writing of our final draft, and we can’t seem to hear our gut over their shouting. Sometimes they come to us before we’re going to hit publish, and we can’t even do it. We just can’t.
Do you know what those voices really want us to do? They want us to give up. They want us to see that story written in a point of view that we’ve never tried before, in a genre we’ve never written before, and they want us to close it up and say it’s just too hard. They want us to forget that we can make mistakes.
That’s why, as writers, we have got to power through them. We have got to write anyway. We cannot let those voices dictate what we do next or how we write our story.
WE ARE WRITERS. WE CAN DO THIS.
Whatever “this” is.
We have the ability to challenge ourselves and grow and make mistakes and recover from those mistakes. No one who ever came to this business ever came to it perfect. As far as I know, no one has ever looked at their first books and said, “Wow. I was perfect then. What happened?” because just like we’re growing and learning as people every year of our lives, we are also growing and learning as writers.
So let’s get to it.
Here are some ways to beat the internal editors.
1. Try something new.
Write in a new genre. Write in a different point of view. Start a story from the middle and then figure out the beginning and end. Do whatever it takes to prove to those voices that you can do this and that you’re in it to stay. Right now I’m trying my hand at middle grade fantasy, middle grade science fiction and adult romance/thriller/mystery. I’ve never done any of these genres before (mostly because I typically write literary fiction in first person) and it is HARD. But trying something new is how we grow as writers.
2. Keep writing in that writer’s journal.
We talked about a writer’s journal last week. It’s important to see where we’ve come from and where we’ve been. A writer’s journal can help us make sense of our writing world and what kinds of things we need to do to eliminate the internal editors. Sometimes they come calling when we’re tired or burned out, and we just need a break. Sometimes they come because of fear. Sometimes they have a little grain of truth in them, and we need to learn something new along with trying something new. We can write about all of this in our writer’s journal, and when we feel them calling again, we can go back to the day they bothered us last time and know that we made it through that one; we’ll make it through this one, too.
3. Identify the voice of the internal editor.
Sometimes it’s an old teacher who didn’t really believe in us. Sometimes it’s a parent. Sometimes it’s just us. We have to know those voices.
I know that mine belongs to a creative writing professor from college, in his mid-to-late forties, with balding hair and a stubbly chin. He was the professor who didn’t like my writing in college, and I still hear his public criticism in my head sometimes. Sometimes I imagine a published manuscript in front of my old professor’s face, and me pointing at it saying, “Look what I did, Dr. Jerk.”
We have to know our voices to shut them up. So don’t be afraid to get to know that voice. They can only be damaging if we let them.
4. Take a short break.
Sometimes the internal editors come out because we’re putting too much pressure on ourselves (I was trying to make the final drafts perfect. That puts way too much pressure on a writer. Who decides when it’s perfect, after all?). Sometimes we just need to take a step back and give ourselves permission to fail and fail in an epic way. Failure is only another way to learn, so every time we fail, we get the opportunity to take that experience and turn it into something that benefits us by making us better.
Writing is a vulnerable pursuit. It takes courage to share and put ourselves out there like that. Internal editors can make us afraid, but they don’t have to have power over us if we don’t let them.
