Dear Internal Editor,
Please shut up. Can’t you see I’m trying to work here? I can give you free reign to analyze and destroy my projects AFTER I’ve finished the first draft, but not BEFORE. When you jump in too early (like you’re doing now), it completely destroys my rhythm and freezes me up so that I can’t make any progress.
Yes, I know what you’re going to say: I need you. And you’re right, of course. I do need you. You’re the one that tells me when my beautifully crafted scene that I spent hours on needs to go because it doesn’t contribute anything to the plot, and you’re the one that reminds me that just because something makes sense in my head doesn’t mean that anyone who reads it later will necessarily have any clue what I meant. You are astute, knowledgeable, and persuasive, and you’re always there to bring me down a peg whenever my ego could use some quality deflating.
I appreciate you for all of that, and I know my writing would be absolutely horrible without you.
But I need some space.
Your obsession with word counts and my general wordiness is making it impossible for me to get anywhere on my project. I know that the book I finished drafting last year is too long, and that the sequel I’m working on now is starting to head the same way because I already have 80k words and I’m only a third of the way through it. I read the same articles you did about the industry not even looking at publishing anything more than 130k, and I know that after I finish drafting the sequel I will have to kill about 50% of the first book before I can send out queries again.
You don’t have to keep telling me these things.
Please let me be. I need to be free to write as many words as I want right now so that I can get past the scenes I’m getting stuck in and get through the first full draft without you interrupting me with the revision To Do List or trying to revise before I’m finished writing the book in the first place.
I need you to be patient and wait your turn; I promise that there will be plenty of time for you to berate my work and tear it to shreds later. For now, how about you take a nice vacation?
I would greatly appreciate it.
Sincerely,
My Creative Side
I'm not as nice to my internal editor. I don't write letters to her because she ignores them, and I don't sit her down to talk to her because she just won't listen.
ReplyDeleteInstead, I often have to lock her in a cage and only let her out when she's needed. It's extreme, but it gets the job done.
I don't usually write letters to mine, either, but I thought that it wouldn't hurt to try it once.
ReplyDeleteShe's been particularly pesky lately.
My internal editor isn't all that mean, except when I'm revising something long, like a novel. When that happens, she's quite nasty and pesimistic and I have to resort to drastic measures.
ReplyDeleteSometimes that involves locking her up, like you said Nicole.