Fighting Your Internal Editor During NaNoWriMo (plus: good news!)

Cheering y'all to write your first drafts, discussing the role of internal editors, sharing good publishing news, and sharing things that made me laugh. Do you remember laughter? It's great.

What a time to write a book. This month in particular has me feeling more sympathy than ever for my fellow humans. I’m getting over the flu, and a loved one just came out of surgery, and there’s drama at work. Even if you don’t have that much on your plate, there’s a very important election in the U.S. tomorrow, and they crammed holidays later into this month. How is one supposed to make the words go? People are writing an entire novel this month of all months?

I typed a lot of the following sitting the waiting room of a hospital, hoping to help one person in their rough time, while hoping these words would help you through some of your rough times.

FIRST YOU MUST CONFESS THAT YOU AREN’T DOING NANOWRIMO, YOU HIPSTER

Okay, I am not actually doing NaNoWriMo. Right now I’m recovering. I finished a novel in early 2022, spent Spring and Summer doing a novella, and in all the cracks of my spare time I wrote somewhere between 10 and 20 new shorts and essays. I’m currently waiting for my editor to send me revisions on my novel manuscript, and whenever they’re ready I’ll have to drop everything and start those.

Do I have the itch to start a new novel?

Yes.

In fact, I have another document open right now where I’m scratching down notes for characters and worldbuilding and big juicy story beats that make my heart swell in my chest. I can almost feel the tension in my fingers from how they’ll fly when my two main characters meet for the first time. It’s going to be an experience.

But I’m not writing that story today.

What I want to share is how I’ll write that book. It’s about layers.

ON WRITING FOR YOURSELF FIRST, AND EDITING FOR YOUR AUDIENCE LATER

Watch a skilled painter or comic book artist and you’ll see that the Mona Lisa smile doesn’t come first. The internet has gifted us with so many videos of artists going from the first touch of a pencil to paper all the way to the finished image. I love watching these. I think every beginning writer should have to watch such videos on a regular basis. You see how the foundational elements go down first, and when they’re done, more layers are laid over them. The final draft of an image pulls all the other layers together into a whole. If you watch an artist work, then you stop being fooled by thinking the final draft should appear as soon as you start your work.

When you put your first noun and verb down in a blank Word document, the intent shouldn’t be a Mona Lisa smile. Syntax should break. Little red squiggles should appear under some words. As I’m beginning telling you this, the word processor’s editor routine is chasing after me questioning my grammatical and tonal choices. I don’t care.

On the first draft I write for myself.

On my second draft I write for you.

Especially when you’re writing something long and taxing, like 50,000 words of a novel in the same month as a major election and a family holiday weekend, you need to write for yourself. If you’re on a deadline—like if you usually don’t write 10k in a month and now need to write 50k—then you need everything typed down on the page.

Every dialogue exchange you think will be clever.

Every internal monologue on how the world is changing too quickly.

Every nuance of your lore and research.

Every single adjective of character description.

I need you write these things. Mess up the pacing. Reveal your twists too early. This stuff is necessary.

Why is it necessary?

Firstly, because there’s nowhere else for this material to go. It only exists if it makes it onto the page. Perhaps the four paragraphs explaining the flora of the rolling highlands will make more sense in Chapter 5 than in Chapter 1, but you can cut and paste that description later. If you get in the way of your own literary compulsions, then the words don’t get down on the page and the stuff never gets to exist. If an excuse will help, then you can skip down the page and hastily create a “CHAPTER 5” header and write the description there. But the material has to be typed or it isn’t material.

The material also has to be typed or you can’t discover what it unlocks. The self-indulgence of having your two prissiest characters jab at each other’s fashion sense may just establish their personalities and roles in the world, and that’ll be all they need to do.

But in making that argument scene tangible, you remove it from your imagination. Now your imagination has room to conjure the next thing. Frequently for myself the next thing is a consequence of the characters bantering—a wager arising, or an antagonist hearing them and threatening them, or a comet hitting the earth just as they think up the best possible insult. When you write your current idea down, it has the potential to animate. It can be the tiny snowball rolling down the mountainside, destined to pick up the sort of mass that will define your whole novel by the time the chapter is over.

Often the stuff doesn’t snowball. That’s fine. It’s down on the page and you can move on to the next thing, which hopefully will snowball.

You can only know what will work when you write everything down. Sometimes it feels like you’re transgressing and letting yourself write trivial things; other times it feels like you’re forcing yourself to write stuff that you’d be embarrassed if anyone read. Your next ten sentences may be straight-up trash. But if they are trash, it’s better that they are out of your head so your head can conjure the ten sentences that come after those ten.

WHAT ABOUT MY INTERNAL EDITOR, THO

Often we desire our current ten sentences to be pristine. We want them to be something our favorite Literature teacher would be proud of. We want the literary equivalent of the finished painting, when we’ve just picked up the brush. Put another way, the overrated “internal editor” judges everything we type and mires us in doubt and shame.

I lost several years of my career to my internal editor, getting intimidated out of sitting down to write anything for fear it would be bad. It seriously hurt my development as a writer. Over time, I’ve learned about writing process and craft. Today my stories have won big awards, and have been translated into nine languages, and I have a fancy book deal. I want you to keep that in mind as I share this upcoming sentence.

The internal editor does not have a place in the first draft.

When I’m writing the first draft of a new short story, or a new novel, or a blog post for John Wiswell Dot Substack Dot Com, the “internal editor” worse than useless. On the first draft, an internal editor is as useful to the writing process as the instinct that tells me it’s time to put on new socks. It doesn’t have a place here.

Editing is a process of refinement. You edit things you’ve written. You can’t pre-edit; you can only prevent. There’s no point in preventing words from being written so they can be fixed.

You don’t tell somebody to stop practicing singing because the notes aren’t right on the first try.

You don’t tell somebody to stop running track because they didn’t break the world record this morning.

That’s not how works-in-progress function. That’s not how improvement works.

Calling it an “internal editor” is overrating it. It didn’t earn that job title. It isn’t editing, because you aren’t editing right now, anymore than you’re singing or running track-and-field. When we complain that our internal editor is running amok, we’re giving it too much credit. Even when people think it’s a bad influence, they still think this editorial instinct has a point—but it doesn’t. It’s just an interruption. It should be treated as such.

If your Social Studies teacher stood next to you in Gym class and kept telling you to put the baseball bat down and explain how World War I ended, you'd be pretty upset with them. This is not their class. This is not the time to do their work. You have stuff to do and they're in the way.

When you're writing a first draft, the internal editor does not have useful feedback for you. Yes, World War I was important and we should know about it, but now is not the time to discuss it. These alleged on-the-fly edits we think up are an obnoxious distraction. It is noise, not signal.

When we internalize this truth, then writing your raw fiction down despite what your internal editor says is much easier. Over time you’ll recognize these doubts and distractions as having little value to this stage in your process. Recognizing this is part of mastery. It’s fine to struggle with it, and it’s important to know that you can get better at it with work.

All you have to do today is write something that you can improve later.

Once I’ve written a complete piece of fiction, then I scrutinize it. I will cut three days’ worth of work in minutes. I’ll turn a page and a half of banter into six wickedly funny lines.

On the second draft, I edit. My job isn’t to entertain myself or get out of my own way anymore. Now all the material is down, and my job is to hone what I have into something that is maximally accessible to my audience. I have a particularly weird brain, so I work very hard at shaping my work so that it can touch others.

On the first draft I write for myself.

On my second draft I write for you.

Between the two, I build a bridge. It lets fiction travel between my imagination and yours. That’s a beautiful thing our language lets us do.

It is pretty darned hard to do all of it at once. You can get better at it, and then new parts of it will be hard, and you might get better at those too. It’s going to be easier if you let yourself focus on the layer you’re drawing right now.

Good luck on the page, my friends and fellow conspirators.

AND NOW: COOL PUBLISHING NEWS

I’m thrilled to announce some fresh story sales. These things will come your way in 2023.

People keep asking if I’ll drop out of short fiction now that I have a book deal.

My answer: absolutely not!

I love the short form. It’s hard for me not to drop into a new short every morning. I might even be cheating on my WIP with another short right now.

As a thank-you to you folks who are reading this newsletter, I have a few short story announcements for you.

I’ve sold a brand new short story titled “Bad Doors” to Uncanny Magazine. It will be in their special 50th issue, alongside works by Ken Liu, Eugenia Triantafyllou, Sarah Pinsker, and others.

“Bad Doors” is about a literal magic door, and the man who refuses to open it. Kosmo didn’t seen where the curious burgundy door arrived from, but he knows evil when he sees it. Kosmo immediately abandons his house to avoid what he’s sure is a curse. But when he moves into his new place… the door is waiting for him. In fact there may be no place on Earth that the door won’t follow Kosmo. What happens when you refuse destiny’s call?

Secondly, I’ve sold “So You Want to Kiss Your Nemesis” to Lightspeed Magazine. This will be my debut in Lightspeed, a place I’ve wanted to be published for years.

“So You Want to Kiss Your Nemesis” is about a very special store. They sell romantic equipment for rivals. Think of it as an engagement ring store, except they sell rapiers. That special blade that will let you tell someone you will feud with them for the rest of their lives.

Thirdly, my short story “The Coward Who Stole God’s Name” will be reprinted and produced for audio by Pseudopod. The story originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, and has received a wonderful reception. I’m excited for it to reach a new audience.

“The Coward Who Stole God’s Name” is about a journalist who gets invited to interview the world’s most beloved man and learn the secret as to why everyone loves him. Because while literally everyone on the planet loves Gavin Davenport, not one person can actually explain why. Not one person, except perhaps Gavin himself. It’s a dark secret that is going to change this journalist’s life, that’s for sure. Because what will the world do when it doesn’t like what it hears?

And lastly, my Locus-winning novelette “That Story Isn’t The Story” will be reprinted and produced for audio by Realm Media for their Stories To Keep You Up At Night podcast. This novelette originally appeared in Uncanny Magazine, and has gotten one of the greatest receptions I’ve ever experienced.

“That Story Isn’t the Story” follows Anton, the familiar to a powerful figure known only as Mr. Bird, who is going to try to break free of their bond—by therapy rather than magic. Afraid he can no longer survive in this abusive relationship, Anton seeks refuge with the last friends who will still talk to him, and try to build a life far away from Mr. Bird’s influence. But Mr. Bird isn’t going to let Anton leave so easily.

CAN WE HAVE FUNNY THINGS?

I think we can swing that.

If you’d like to hear even more from me, I’m running an AMA on my Patreon for subscribers this month. There will also be a mysterious bonus post in about another week. You can find out all about that here.

Until next time, be good to yourselves. It’s the time for that.