Sometimes, when I’m having a terrible, horrible, no good, really bad day, I’ll look up from the blank word document on the computer screen in front of me, glance over at the neat, colorful row of Harry Potter books on the shelf, and collapse into a black hole of despair over the fact that I’m not J.K. Rowling.
This is not healthy behavior, I know.
If you are a writer, you know about the voice inside your head that talks non-stop while you try and work on your writing. It may give you advice on how to fix what you just wrote. It may tell you you’re no good at writing and that you should take up a different hobby. It may just distract you.
This voice is your Inner Editor. Here are four ways to control your Inner Editor and keep it from distracting you as you write.
This weekend, a friend of mine invited me to brunch at her house with her roommates and some other folks. We had crepes, and they were delicious (I would recommend everyone make them at their own brunches). We ended up spending a good chunk of the afternoon discussing cards from this Table Topics deck. Most of the questions were terrible conversation starters (“How would you go about ending homelessness?” Really?). But we found one that dealt with movies, and someone mentioned the Toy Story trilogy, which immediately sent all of us into the nostalgia zone. This also brings me to today’s writing tool: anthropomorphism.
Choosing what to write next is the most important decision you can make as a writer. If you choose poorly, you’ll finish your piece and realize no one is interested in reading what you’ve written. Worse, you might have to abandon it in the middle, realizing you never should have started it in the first place.
How do you choose the right project to work on next?
