Writing Wednesday: The Internal Editor

It’s NaNoWrimo time of year when writers are encouraged to write out a book in one month. I’m going to try it this year. I had been thinking about putting up the little progress bar on this site. I should have thought about it earlier because a lot of people seemed to be like me and waited to the last minute and now their site is as slow as molasses. So it will be a while before I get the progress bar up.

I’m not too concerned with writing the 50,000 in a month, I’ve done it before. I’ll either be able to turn my internal editor off or I won’t. The internal editor is what killed me writing my last novel that I am stuck at the 40,000 page mark.

When I finished THE PIZZA DIARIES I went through and did a huge rewrite 30,000 words and changed it from a 65,000 word novel to slightly over 90,000 added another bad guy and some new characters because my main character didn’t have enough to deal with.

Then because I’m a glutton for punishment I did major revisions to two of my other novels and joined Scribophile an online critique group where I critique other people’s work and they critique mine.

Then I sat down to write another novel and it went incredibly slow as I would write something, critique it, rewrite it and repeat. And after all that the first half of the first draft isn’t all that much better than my other first drafts.

So with this one I plan on just writing whatever crap flows out of my head and fix it later, hopefully I can get my internal editor to turn off and I can return my other novel and quickly write the second half of.

To encourage me to write the novel I won’t be blogging until I write 1,500 on the novel so there might be some days I won’t be posting and my post will probably be a little shorter than they have been, which might not be to bad of a thing.

I plan on keeping everyone updated as to how I’m doing in this and it and if NaNoWriMo’s site starts working I’ll put a little progress bar on this site.

By Darrell B. Nelson author of Invasive Thoughts