Black Hippy Chick Day: How to Destroy Your Work Absolutely

Writers have two selves:

The writer (That’s the magical, mystical, inspired “you” who puts down the first draft.
The editor (That’s the anal, precise “you” who fixes that draft.

Your inner editor is hazardous to your inner writer, and your inner writer is hazardous to your inner editor. They each need their own rooms, but keeping them apart isn’t always easy to achieve. If you make a mistake and let one of them into the wrong room, you stand to lose some fantastic writing.

There are many ways your inner editor can encroach upon your inner writer. By:

• Being self-critical while you write your first draft.

• Repairing your text during writing.

• Being so frightened of your feelings and thoughts that you can’t explore them.

• Going back to edit the beginning of a long piece so often you never get around to writing the rest of it. (Ask me. I’ve edited the first chapter of my novel every time I sat down to write it, and I’ve never finished Chapter Two.)

• Writing a full edit of a piece before you have a comprehensive grasp of which parts to leave in.

That last point is, perhaps, the most important because you will have to make that decision literally every time you write something. It’s tough to be objective of your own work. The only way I know how to achieve it is by setting the work aside and returning to it when you’ve forgotten it well enough to see it clearly.

In other words it can be dangerous to workshop a poem, then immediately sit down to edit it afterwards. Your inner writer won’t be able to defend your work from your inner editor, so you stand to destroy the beauty you’ve created. You can lose years of work this way.

Your first draft is precious. You only get one. If you’ve managed to give your inner writer free reign during your first draft, you’ve found some diamonds. Editing that work before you have objectivity is like giving an unqualified human the tools to cut those diamonds. You stand to lose a valuable stone.