That Darn Internal Editor

How do you turn off your internal editor?  If you're a writer or not, you probably have that voice in your brain that nags and nags.  Freud called it the Superego.  I call it annoying.

I am in editing mode lately.  I successfully reduced a story that I'd written for a flash fiction contest (see post below) from 2000+ words to 730 without losing the best parts of the story.  Now don't get me wrong.  I like this story.  It is a scene within a larger novel that I am currently writing and loving, but I've had to rip it out of the hands of my internal editor because, darn her, she won't let it go.  I read the flash fiction story again today and itched to tweak this and that, saw way too many SVO (subject verb object) sentences, and wanted to rush off an apology for the horrible writing which I'd subjected the judges for the contest to.  Doubt swarmed me, and suddenly, my editor started talking round and round in my head and confusing the daylights out of me.

I wasn't sure what to do except walk away and hope for the best.  Harder than it looks.  In the words of Daniel Tosh, "It's like trying to act all bad while winking."  Who you kidding?  But, fortunately for my latest habit of wasting too much time on blogs and such, I found this little nugget on the Istoria Book blog, http://www.istoriabooks.blogspot.com/.  It pretty much shows the WORST editor ever (there may be a few just as bad), and gave me a laugh while sending my own internal editor back to the hole in my brain where she usually hides.

Maybe now I can relax and be patient for the results, whatever they may be. 

Leave a comment with any tricks you have to make that nagging know-it-all go away?

Happy Writing!