Speed Bumps

In 2021, I figured out a #LifeHack to trick my internal editor into letting me get thousands of words onto the page a day, without stepping in to interfere. This fast drafting method, which I call sketching, has let me trounce NaNoWriMo twice in a row, and I plan to do it again.

For right now, though, I’m in the last stretch revising Chronicles of The Wheel - Book One, where I transform that written sketch into something I can bear to let another human being read. Only, I’ve hit a speed bump. Some major revisions needed to be done to this group of chapters, and I’m writing whole new scenes I hadn’t planned on before.

Suddenly, I’m back to my old writing process, where I might get 2-300 words in a 20 minute sprint, if I’m lucky. Why? My internal editor is insisting we scrutinize the next sentence, the next paragraph, the next micro-sequence before we dare put it down on the page. I’m not just talking about word choice. I’m talking about examining the event in universe, from all angles, to find the best way to present the material and determine if it should be included at all.

I get some pretty good scenes writing this way, but it takes forever. I tell myself, it’s a new scene. Just sketch it! But here my internal editor resists. We’re not throwing mud against the wall anymore just to see what sticks. It insists we have a sculpture in progress now, and we can’t just slap on a new glob of clay and squish it around like before. What if we damage something else in the process?

A part of me says this thinking is silly. If it doesn’t work, we’ll just remove it and try again. It’s only a sketch.

The other part remembers all the times we’ve tried to make small changes before, and how they snowballed into major revisions through whole sections of a manuscript, just to make this one small change make sense.

Do you struggle with this? How do you cope with your internal editor leaning over your shoulder as you work?