My Internal Editor Doesn't Have an Off Switch
Wednesday, April 20, 2005
I'm completely blocked. I have been for weeks now. Every time I sit down to write, I end up staring blankly at my computer screen for hours on end, producing nothing more than a few words, or a full sentence if I'm lucky.I'm not entirely sure why that is. Granted, I've written more in the past six months than I have in a long, long time (if ever), but I still have all this time on my hands that I could be writing, and yet nothing is coming.
Partly, I think, it's because I still see myself as an editor first. Combine that with my perfectionist control freak tendencies and it means that I have trouble writing crap that I can fix later. My expectations are that it comes out perfect and ready to be published the first time I put pen to paper (or, uh, finger to keyboard *grin*). Which is why, even when I'm "on a roll", I can still take several hours to produce two paragraphs. I know I need to just let go, just splat what's in my head out and then sit down and do what I do best, edit it later. The problem is, I'm trying to do both the writing and the editing all at the same time, and that isn't working. I wish I could figure out how to stop doing that. I've read all of the books about turning off your internal editor, but mine doesn't have an off switch.
Because I'm finding the process very frustrating. If it takes two months to write 30 pages, well, that's a) not very productive and b) rather discouraging that I'm spending all this time "writing" and I'm not really getting anything accomplished.