Have you experienced this? Is it good to edit as you go, or is it better to "let loose" and then clean it up later? If you side with the "let loose" strategy, did you have to train yourself to do so? How?

Thanks for any input!

So - there's an idea for you. In lieu of sitting down and writing where you can let your energy go into rewording each phrase, how about try starting with just an outline or some type of summary/high-level overview/structure diagram (it doesn't have to be linear, some people do better drawing the concept of their story than trying to write a numbered list, at least at first - ordering the events later.) Because you can expect that NONE of what you write when outlining will be in the actual story, hopefully you can tell your inner editor to go take a hike for a while. Maybe having a detailed plan will also then keep the editor at bay, because now if you find yourself getting bogged down on scene A, you can shelve it, and move instead to scene B.

Mind you, I have no idea if this will be successful. But it's an idea.

Another idea for you would be to try to do a timed writing assignment where you don't allow yourself to rewrite. If you take a simple story idea and say for example give yourself 30 minutes to write whatever comes to mind on that story example...see what happens. Don't force yourself into it being a fully thought-out story with a beginning, middle, end, characters, etc., instead just write for 30 mins straight and see where you are. See how you feel.

Another thought, one that I've also been dabbling with lately, is to write longhand. I know, it boggles the mind, but I find that sometimes I get gun-shy about typing my ideas. I type really fast (hence my extraordinarily long post length) and I think I kind of psyche myself out when I sit down to type an idea. And then at my desk, there's nothing much to look at if I lose a train of thought or want to just think about something for a minute before writing it down, so I get bored. I've been taking a thick quad-ruled notebook (I love quad-ruled paper, graph paper) and nice new pen with me to the coffee shop or outside on a nice day or whatever, and just writing with that. I don't feel any pressure to edit, because I don't really leave myself enough room to anyway (instead I edit slightly when I type it in, which works well for me.) I also like the feel of pen on paper, it's a completely different process for me than typing. I find that using both longhand and typing is getting me farther and giving me more satisfaction than just typing alone.

Get the shXt piled up (first draft completed to where it says "the end") and THEN I can take out the tools and shape it into a real story.

Also, I give myself a minimum number of words to produce each day. They don't have to be brilliant, just typed onto where I left the story yesterday. AND...I make the minimum an easy one. I SET MYSELF UP TO SUCCEED. I can usually write more than 1000 passable words a day even in the worst of times (after work, after dinner, dead tired). So, I set myself a 500 word minimum. If I'm sick, it goes down to 100 words...even once, 50 words. Just some goal that I CAN meet.

And I finish the blasted thing. If I hit a bad spot, I leave line or two blank or even insert an idea of what is supposed to happen here (like -- they go a meeting with the elders and hero discovers he's not human). If it's too hard, "that's a second draft problem" I say aloud and forge ahead to the end.

I got over/around this one year by participating in NaNoWriMo. Long story short, you challenge yourself to write a 50,000 word novel during November, starting at midnight on the 1st and finishing by midnight on the 30th. Needing to keep up a pace of 1,667 words a day to succeed and knowing that there are many many people who are doing the same helps immensely. Once you start to do it, truly force yourself to do nothing but write fast and write hard and get words down on the paper, it starts to come a little easier as time goes by.

Of course, this isn't necessarily helpful since November is 4 months away (is that it? Gotta get ideas together for my next NaNo....) and you're writing right now. I think that some of the other suggestions made above will be very helpful. Set a time limit and a word count goal and force yourself to meet it. The specifics of the benchmarks you set for yourself will depend heavily on your ability - a fast typist has an advantage over a hunt-n-peck'r. In my opinion, you should be able to put out 500 words every half hour, or 1,000 words in an hour. Some days it'll come more easily and some days it'll be a tough slog, but if you've got a good idea most of the days should be easier. The important thing to remember is to not worry about what you've already written and focus on what you haven't written. You could give me a few paragraphs of the most amazing prose ever put to paper, but if you're unable to get to an ending, it's worthless to me.

This is part of the reason why it's a good idea to complete a piece before submitting your first 13 here for a critique. Far too many people get too hellbent on perfecting the beginning and lose all of the momentum that would have carried them through to the end.

Okay, so, long story short from me. Set two goals for yourself:

1) Short period goals - write 500-1,000 words in a sitting before you even think about changing the slightest thing.
2) Long period goals - remember the important part of writing is to finish. Limit the amount of editing you do during the writing process because time spent editing is more profitably spent writing.

Best of luck! Come back for encouragement whenever you need it!

Jayson Merryfield

But, every five days, if I choose, I allow myself to go back and fix things like continuity errors I might have noticed, changes in dialogue I want to make, prose I want to adjust, etc. While I'm writing, to appease the Inner Editor, I also allow myself to keep a note of things I might want to change later. That way my paranoia about forgetting a detail I want to include or change is appeased.

I also have KayTi's problem, where my writing stamina wanes pretty easily. An interruption - or worse yet, a lack of planning - can ground me quick. I've learned that daily word goals, and a lot of scene-by-scene outlines can help with this a lot. Also, if you have an outline with what you want to accomplish per scene/chapter, that seems to act almost like a first draft so that by the time you sit down to write it, it's not so rough, because you know where you're going. Her idea of swapping scene A for scene B depending on your writing mood has worked for me.

Good luck!

In other words, you are going to write the way you are going to write, and there is nothing you can do about it. You can learn tricks about plotting and characterization, but your basic style is the style of the internal monologue in your head, and of your voice when you speak, and those come out unedited. Constantly fiddling with your writing is just a way of avoiding the pain of finishing, submitting, and risking rejection.

This doesn't mean you should not fix obvious errors and typos. And it certainly doesn't mean you shouldn't rewrite. But don't fiddle.

1. Turn off any spelling/grammar checks in your word processor, so the computer doesn't draw attention to potential problems. They can be fixed later (why do something today that can be put off until later?)

2. Change your font color to a light gray that you can't really read at normal sitting distance from the screen. Then you'll have nothing to go back and edit.

3. Learn not to look at the screen while typing, not too hard for me because I have to look at the keyboard .

The biggest is just don't let yourself do it. Don't reread what you've written until it's done, except just a sentence to see where you previously left off after breaking.

The worst thing is to keep reading back over what you've just typed, although it is a natural thing to do.

While writing, the only good reason to look back at words you have already written is to double check a fact in order to maintain consistency. (i.e. Was Sally wearing a blue shirt when she entered the room, or a green shirt?)

I admit to being a tweaker, but I wait until the following day. Then I start reading the story from the beginning to pick up the rhythm while making small enhancements along the way. I look for and improve those weak areas that I quickly buzzed through the day before, then enter into the area of new prose and continue on.

Notebored has a Flash challenge, too, and they are excepting new members.

You might try this with your story. Sit down and write the story, "watch" it in your mind - and most importantly write it down - I mean write down EVERYTHING that comes to mind as the story moves forward. Write it down even if the material seems to be of no use. You will be surprised how many times it will be useful as the story unfolds. Will this be your story? Of course not - BUT having written down everything you are now at a point of writing a story by reduction - toss out the unimportant, keep the rest to polish in a later draft. The advantage of this is that it may take you in new and better directions than you otherwise might not have gone. With so much information the direction of the story will usually make itself apparent and hence be easier to write.

Once you get about 10 stories in the mail, you stop worrying about making everything perfect because there is always another story to send.

However I have turned to two technological gadgets to aid my writing, Dragon Naturally speaking and a tablet pc.

The former I have used for 6 months and find it really quite useful for dictation of previously written material as well as direct dictation of new material.

The latter I have just purchased and will arrive tomorrow. I hope that it will make it easier to edit my work if I have pen like interface, maybe even write original work with it as well.

I don't agree with any of that -- at least not in an absolute sense. If Spaceman's first drafts are his best drafts, and if that's how he gets his best voice, more power to him. I can't write like that. I tried for three years, and I can't. Some things can't be learned because they fly in the face of what's natural to you.

Me, I've finally accepted that I'm a slow and methodical writer -- that I work best when I work slowly, building a story from the ground up, beginning with a diary that becomes a scene outline that becomes a synopsis that becomes a treatment that finally becomes a first draft.

I've also found that my best prose isn't written, but, rather, rewritten -- and that I work best when I make one "unit of fiction" as best as I can before moving on. (A unit of fiction is smaller than a scene--i.e., a description, dialogue, action, etc.) This process feels natural to me because I feel that I am building upon a solid foundation -- that my second paragraph will be better after spending some time writing my first paragraph, and so forth.

I finish this up with a final polish, after letting it sit for a couple of days. Then it's in the mail.

It's slow. I'm not going to be prolific writing this way, but that's the way I do it. I'd rather write 12 very good stories over the course of a year than 52 crappy ones.

I'm not to say that writers who work fast write bad stories. I'm only saying that if I work fast I write bad stories. Maybe if Spaceman (who seems like a fast writer) were to work the way I work, maybe he would end up writing crappy stories. I dunno.

The hardest thing about learning how to write is learning how YOU write. The second hardest thing is to accept the way you write. After that, everything is gravy.

Dashing off final-draft quality prose from the start is probably the exception rather than the rule. For me, and I suspect a few others, it is more important to keep moving forward through the story until it is complete, then go back to optimize it.

Would anybody notice their absence? Gee, I don't know...

Personally, in the future (when I do tackle a big project) I will write through it much like I'd tackle NanoWrimo, but with a certain set of ideas and plot stabilized in my mind.

King says that once your finished with something like that, you need to set it in a desk far away and just /forget/ about it. Leave it alone for 2-4 weeks. Once you decide you want to go back to it, you'll see a lot more than your internal editor originally saw, allowing for a clean re-write.

However, making the leap to a one-draft writer can be just as bad. I once tried to conquer my tweaking monkey by sending out a story with the "throw it against the wall and let's see if it sticks" technique. I was mortified when I read what I had done. Now I try to strike some middle ground.

This thread kind of reads like a self-help group: "how I solved that problem," "I used to struggle with this problem," "I learned to give myself permission," "I too fail often," "I've finally accepted." <<Welcome to Tweakers Anonymous.>>

P.S.

quote:

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I've gone back to the typewriter several times in the last few years

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1) It takes practice to teach yourself how to compose the story. It really isn't one draft, it's just one draft in writing.

My point is that too little tweaking is as bad as continuous tweaking, though for different reasons.

One-draft writing as a learned skill? In a sense. I tend to think, though, that writers naturally track to their personal writing style. However, I would generally expect better quality writing from multiple-drafting. (That's my story and I'm sticking to it.)

I wonder if the author in the "Editors Needed" thread is a one-drafter. Maybe that's a big part of the problem.

There is one author I know of who is basically a one-drafter, and that's Bodie Thoene. She writes one day, and the next morning her husband reads it, then she makes any corrections and that's supposedly it. Different strokes...

"Accept what you like...reject all the rest" will only go so far, though. How many agents/editors will accept a hand-written manuscript, for instance? Eventually, we are coerced into submission. (Oooo...a pun!)