I was reading an article from Writers’ Digest the other day and one of the suggestions spoke to me. No. It yelled at me.

Allow yourself to write badly.

Wow. I needed that. You see, editing as I go is one of my greatest problems. While my friends can plow through a chapter in an hour, I find myself twiddling and tweaking the same 1500 words to death until my writing time has expired. I have a WONDERFUL first few pages,until the next time I sit down and re-read it. Then the editing hat comes out and off I go, again.

How many times have I heard “Don’t edit. Just get it down on paper. Edit later.”? Hmmpf.  You don’t deal with that little voice in your head that says Wait! You have to fix this. Now!

If you are like me, you know we think we are doing it so it will be perfect when we get to the end. Hmmm… who told us that? Most likely, we’ll have to go through and change things because of the way the story ended. Something didn’t work and the beginning has to be adjusted. Or as the story moved along, we decided we needed something that wasn’t there, so we have to go back and put it in.

So you see…edit-as-you-go is really a fail.

Realistically, we should allow ourselves unrestrained writing. Write like we are telling it to an audience that is going to leave in five minutes. If we were telling this story – say, around a campfire – we wouldn’t have the luxury of saying “Oh, wait a minute. He did this first, THEN he did that.” Nope. Our audience wouldn’t put up with that. We’d have to hope we told it right the first time.

So turn it loose. Let the words fall where they may. Write badly. It’s really okay! Later, after that imaginary audience has gone home and the whole story has been set free, we can go back and find out what might work better or be added. For no matter how good we think it is, we WILL have to edit it again, and again.

Okay. I’ve given you the advice that I need to learn to take, myself. So, cross-stitch this on a linen hanky and frame it. No – don’t take the time to do that. Just print it out in a fancy font on an 8 x 10 piece of paper. Hang it right in front of your computer.

Repeat, every time you look up.

Allow Yourself to Write Badly