Smackdown With Your Inner Editor

By Debbie Maxwell Allen

photo credit: Debbie Allen

Do you wrestle with your inner editor? Do your eyes wander over the last paragraph you wrote, unable to rest until you've eliminated the little red squigglies under each word? Do you find it easier to spend your precious writing time analyzing previous pages than writing new words?

It's time for a smackdown.

Your creative side loves to explore new worlds and uncharted territory. Your analytical side wants to fix everything and make it logical. Unfortunately, to do both at the same time makes for a double-minded writer.

You may very well be polishing your manuscript in anticipation of pitching at the next Pikes Peak Writers Conference. Here are some resources to motivate your red pen--so you can get back to writing.

I've gathered a great crop of resources from other writers who have tackled this issue. They haven't solved it, but some of their advice might be exactly what you need to try to keep your editor at bay--at least until your manuscript is finished and it's time to let him or her out from exile.

One thing I do when my inner editor won't keep quiet is to write in the dark. Yes, it's messy, but effective. Computer users can also choose a font color that matches your screen color so your words will be invisible, or dim your screen to black. Don't forget to save, though! If you have a desktop with a wireless keyboard, move across the room from your screen. Here are some more tips:

Mandy Houk, member of Pikes Peak Writers, shares a great visual for writers to understand what the inner editor does to our confidence.

Cassie Mae, at The Writer's Dojo, gives four practical tips for shutting off the inner editor. I really like her color idea.

Tina Radcliffe over at Seekerville, wowed me with her unauthorized cheat sheet of self-editing tips. I'll be using tip #4 to create my own 'weasel words' list.

The NaNoWriMo blog has a post on A 7-Step Guide to Big Picture Revision (With Bonus Checklists!). I love using highlighters to help me visualize what's missing--or overdone.

Check out the Three Stages of Editing (and nine handy do-it-yourself tips) to whip your manuscript into shape.

And finally, Entrepreneur offers a list of ten words to cut from your writing. Super fast and easy fixes to get your manuscript into shape.

Have you found anything useful for keeping your inner editor locked up? Or is yours particularly well-behaved?

About the Author: Debbie Maxwell Allen writes young adult historical fantasy in the Rocky Mountains. She blogs about free resources for writers at Writing While the Rice Boils. 

Your Relationship With Your Work (or Do You Have a Doris?)

By Linda Rohrbough


I’ve never heard this put the way I’m about to put it, but I think writers have a relationship with their work. And I think writers worry about that relationship. I know I do.

Experienced writers know they have a relationship with their work and they cultivate it. If you listen, you can hear them talk about the life the work takes on and how it affects them.

New writers don’t really understand this, which is one of the reasons it’s hard to get a new writer to be quiet in a critique group. They want to jump up and defend their work against what they see as attack. They don’t realize they have a golden opportunity. A critique is a way to see their work through fresh eyes – and learn what their strengths are as well as how to improve.

I don’t see experienced writers defend their work. They listen carefully, taking in every word. Sometimes I can’t get them to even comment on what I’ve said. If we’re alone and I’m talking about something of theirs I read or about an idea they’ve presented to me, they go deep into themselves, taking that information with them and digesting it in great detail. Sometimes they lock down so tight that I realize I’m alone and I have to wait for them to come back. And that can take awhile. So I just shut up and wait.

Earlier this year, I was on a road trip, driving across Florida with a writer friend. We were talking about a novel I’m plotting, and I closed up like that. I realized that what I had done was move inside the book. I was no longer in the car driving past the Everglades on the way to a small town cameo shop my friend wanted to visit. I was on the runway at Denver International Airport, the wind blowing my hair, the jet fuel making my nostrils tingle, the hard pavement under my feet, my ears ringing from the sounds. I was my main character now, reliving her memories of Afghanistan, the goose bumps on her arms, the press of a jacket rearranging itself as the cool prairie wind folds and unfolds it against her arms. I felt her dread of sand in her teeth from the last explosion because everything was the same, except the wind then was hot, like when you open an oven. She dreaded the ear blasting sounds of mortar rounds, and the sand that would pelt her cheeks and leave small red marks she’d have to scrub off later along with the coppery smell of blood that wouldn’t leave.

It took me a while to come out of it. And my writer friend, knowing where I was, patiently waited as I’ve learned to do.

In thinking about relationship with the work, I remembered one of the things that helped me a great deal when I first started writing was my friend, Doris, who lived up the street. She doesn’t know it, but I screwed up the courage to write some days, most days actually, by pretending I was writing to her.

This was back when I’d just started writing for pay and I was a PTA president in Los Angeles. Doris was treasurer and I often thought our roles should be reversed, that Doris was the one who should be leading and I should be doing the arithmetic. Because Doris had a brand of self-respect that rubbed off on others. She was brilliant, pitched in to help at the slightest provocation, never criticized, and she was a listener. I still remember the small comments she made that encouraged me, usually just a single sentence. Like one day I was telling her about an editor I was working with and she said, “Your business is really starting to take off.”

When I wrote, I tried to talk to her to drown out the negative voices in my head. I’d forget about the editor and the pressure to write, and with my imagined Doris standing behind me nodding her approval, I would thrash the piece around into something I hoped we’d both like.

That was more than twenty years ago, and Doris and I are still friends. I never told her. But I went out of my way to do things to help her, like putting together small wrapped gifts for her kids to open each day on their road trip from Los Angeles to their new home in Atlanta when her husband got transferred. She thought I was just being way too nice. But for me, it was payback, a small gesture of gratitude to someone who’d done so much to help me overcome almost insurmountable fear. Part of the reason I never told her is I’m not sure she’d understand. But I know you, fellow writer, get it.

I heard from a corporate executive that large companies are using a similar technique to serve customers. They build a typical customer, give them a name and a story, and then work to build products and services for that customer. Not some faceless crowd, but Paul who has three kids under the age of seven, a mother in a nursing home, and he and his wife just started shopping for a new family car. What would Paul be looking for from the company’s new product?

There are a number of relationships in publishing, or any other business. The relationship with the work is the one I care about the most. What is your relationship with your work like? Do you have a Doris? If not, are you thinking of getting one?

About the Author: Linda Rohrbough has been writing since 1989, and has more than 5,000 articles and seven books to her credit along with national awards for her fiction and non-fiction. New York Times #1 bestselling author Debbie Macomber said about Linda’s new novel: "This is fast-paced, thrilling, edge-of-the-seat reading. The Prophetess One: At Risk had me flipping the pages and holding my breath." The Prophetess One: At Risk has garnered three national awards: the 2012 International Book Award, the 2011 Global eBook Award, and the 2011 Millennium Star Publishing Award. An iPhone App of her popular “Pitch Your Book” workshop is available in the Apple iTunes store. Visit her website: www.LindaRohrbough.com.

Column: Turn Off That Editor! by Karen Albright Lin

I’ve got to get through it, that first attempt at getting my story down, living as my characters live, moving toward an inevitable yet unpredictable end. Those shitty first drafts, as Anne Lamott calls them in her brilliant book, Bird by Bird. All the workshops, all the books, all the talented and successful writers I know tell me to cage up the editor and whip through the sentences, to puke out the chapters, clean up the mess later. My brain, however, thinks more like an editor. I spit out a sentence, stop, fix that sentence, spit out more, notice that I didn’t backload a paragraph with the most powerful sentence, then the grammar checker is indicating I need to look at a word back where I wrote that clever reversal. Then there’s that pesky run-on sentence…

I’m not talking about scrolling back a few pages to edit and refresh my memory, then moving forward into my next chapter. I’m talking about scrolling back each paragraph and, on a particularly critical day, scrolling back each sentence. Yes, I’m an obsessive editor. I’ve always written that way. In fourth grade I did it. Back then I wrote mostly poetry, a very tight and disciplined form. That didn’t help. Next I graduated to a twelve-year-old version of erotica--wish I’d kept some of those scenes to compare to my adult notes. But I digress. Doesn’t it go figure, I’ve reinforced the early analyzing habit by becoming a professional editor.

Some tell me not to worry over it. I’m still prolific, having written almost a dozen screenplays, three novels, a literary cookbook, newspaper and magazine articles, and short stories (some of them erotica--hopefully different than my grade-school imaginings). I wrote all that while raising two boys. Sure, pat myself on the back, but get on with the writing, and slap that hand that continues to go back, go back, go back. As if I just can’t do my book justice without making every sentence perfect as I go. What's up with that?!

To make matters worse, I write my shitty first drafts long hand, scrawling my additions and corrections all over the yellow pad – yellow to boost creativity. Unfortunately, yellow also nourishes my editing fixation. To make matters doubly frustrating, I have the worst handwriting known to the literate world. So my crazy first drafts are often indecipherable. Even to me. I have only my sisters to turn to when I’m puzzled to the point of pop-eyed madness, for they know me so well that they often step in to save my shitty first draft by interpreting my Gs that look like Ss and my Rs that look like Is and my ups and downs and arrows and my bubbles with sentences that are absolutely necessary to the line above or below or up the side and let’s not forget the middle phrase in the run-on sentence near the bottom of the page. This is no exaggeration. It’s a joke between us.

But when I’m working away solo at a restaurant over lunch, it’s not a joke. Sometimes I wish I could ask my waitress just what it was I wrote half a page up. Ten minutes ago. But then they’d think I wouldn’t be able to read the menu and so would bring me the picture menu. If they had one. OK, now my train of thought has drifted from editing to first drafts to penmanship. I think I need to go back and consider giving this blog entry a work out. Yes, the above photo is of a typical shitty rough draft page of mine, taken by my sister Storm Petrel. Is there a 12-step program for this obnoxious inclination?

It’s no use for me to seek advice on what I can do to improve my penmanship; teachers have been trying to help me there since my early erotica days. But I do ask, dear blog visitor, if you have any hints about how I can turn off my editor.

(Originally posted at the Sisters of the Quill blog on February 17, 2011)

About the Writer:  Karen is an editor, ghostwriter, pitch coach, speaker and award-winning author of novels, cookbooks, and screenplays. She’s written over a dozen solo and collaborative scripts (with Janet Fogg, Christian Lyons and director Erich Toll); each has garnered international, national and regional recognition: Moondance Film Festival, BlueCat, All She Wrote, Lighthouse Writers, Boulder Asian Film Festival, SouthWest Writers Contest, and PPW Contest. Find out more at www.karenalbrightlin.com.