Friday, July 06, 2007

Get thee hence!

It's official. I have started to write my novel. I've been thinking a lot lately about why it has been so hard for me to start writing again despite the fact that I have copious amounts of time in which to do it. I finally came to the realization that my inner editor had become an iron fisted tyrant, keeping me from putting my wonderful ideas on paper.

Don't think I'm vain when I call my ideas wonderful, or I guess you can think I'm vain, but try not to judge me too harshly for it. Every writer must have a healthy amount of vanity, otherwise the rejection slips would be too depressing, and every writer gets rejection slips. Lots of them.

Anyway, every time I try to sit down and write one of my ideas, my inner editor elbows its way past my creative genius and silences every sentence. "That doesn't sound right. You need a better word there. Isn't that misspelled?" Eventually I get so bogged down with the minutiae, that I just give up.

So, for now, I have had to banish my tyrant editor to the outer edges of Mongolia. She'll be allowed back eventually, but not until I've made significant progress on my novel. As I write, I am not worrying about misspelled words, or an awkward sentence here or there. At this point, I am just trying to get down my ideas, my characters, my plot points. I'll go back later to clean up some of the language. It is making a world of difference already.

A thousand words down, only 149,000 to (give or take).

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