I used to have a bit of a problem. No, wait! Dn’t go. I promise this isn’t some sort of horrendous personal issue or pictures of my weird junk! I swear.
No, my problem was I had to make sure every paragraph, every sentence, every damn word… was perfect. Editing was what other people did – I was making pure gold.
And about 50 words an hour.
It wasn’t until I received some advice and took that advice to heart before this changed. The advice was this:
Don’t get it right. Get it written.
Don’t get me wrong – I wasn’t overnight a different writer. Oh no. It took me ages to get this into my brain. I had to make a background for my computer screen with that message written in huge letters (along side the messages ‘You have permission to be crap’ and ‘Write the worst you can. Edit it later, man’).
But it is advice that opened a world of words to me. Now, I write the story down in any old words that come into my head and then go back and fix them so at least then they make sense. Once that is done, I begin the editing phase in earnest.
Understanding that I am allowed to be bad was the key to unlocking things, to gag that internal editor so he can’t tell me how bad I am. I understand, reading posts in Twitter and Facebook, that other people have posted. So perhaps it helps to share this.
Imagine Erratically 
Love the ‘don’t get it right. Get it written’. I tend to be fussy, changing, adding. deleting on the fly as I progress into a story. I am a subtext junky, which is a kind way of saying I am my own worst enemy. I will have to try the new philosophy and see if I can withstand the withdrawal symptoms.
LikeLiked by 1 person