NaNoWriMo: the inner editor must die!

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NaNoWriMo so far has been seriously hard work, and will remain so to the very end (and beyond—I’m only a few thousand words away from the 50,000 required word count and am certain my story will continue to at least 70,000). I love taking part despite feeling terrified every new day when I sit down to write. I am learning by doing and have already discovered that, yes, for me to write a novel with determination I need strict deadlines and goals just as I do with magazine articles. Otherwise I get lazy and undisciplined. I lose interest and enthusiasm. I defeat myself because, no matter who gets to read the work and says it’s good, I think it’s shit. Truly. I do. All the time. And, most importantly, I lose my way because I listen to such rubbish.

The hardest thing to do hasn’t been the words. Or the plot. No, the most difficult thing is making sure my inner editor, the total perfectionist, doesn’t get in the way. He’s the one who says everything is shit. Everything. I live with this bastard every day. So, there is no going back, no tweaking yesterday’s output before starting on today’s, no reappraisal of the story so far: it’s just open up the laptop, and start typing from the point where I left things off the day before. It doesn’t matter if my prose is dodgy one day, pleasing the next. That’s subjective, negatively biased for the most part, and I can hopefully make it all consistently good once the skeleton of the plot is out of my head, and work on the second draft begins.

What I need first is a very rough diamond of a complete novel. Without that, there can be no second draft at all. Obvious? Not to the inner editor. Perfectionist he may be, but he’s also pretty dumb. He never thinks things through, never sees the bigger picture. The inner editor demands that every sentence is perfect before starting on the next. You don’t succeed as a writer of novels if you allow that fuss-pot to dictate your approach to the writing.

The inner editor must die. He can be resurrected when he’s necessary, and he’ll then be welcome to interfere, prune, and pick holes in my work—but not during the first stage of writing. No. Right now, especially as I feel the exhaustion that comes from pumping out so many words in a month starting to get to me, I want to kill him. With my bare hands.

It’s going well. Very well. Beloved has been reading every chapter so far, and despite that voice inside me that insists I’m producing textual excrement, I am told the story is a real thriller: gripping, sexy, scary, mysterious and imaginative. Of course I don’t believe a word of it—all I see is repetition, and I am sick of words like ‘the’, ‘and’, ’said’–ridiculous, I know—but I’m going to get to the end of this journey and ignore my shadow-self.

I found a great quote today that applies to my situation as a writer and as a human being, in ways I cannot begin to cover on my blog, nor frankly would I want to—but I will say it also resonates because of what my first novel is shaping up to be about:

“No one has ever written, painted, sculpted, modeled, built, or invented except literally to get out of Hell.”

Antonin Artaud (1896–1948), French theatre producer and actor (1947; repr. in Selected Writings, pt. 33, ed. by Susan Sontag, 1976).