This is The Nooner, a short daily (Monday - Saturday) newsletter slash podcast that has its very own section within Dispatches from Inner Space.
Every Sunday, I publish the Dispatches Weekly Digest (DWD), which lets you binge all the Nooners from the previous week. It also includes a meaningful song recommendation, and a short segment I call TMI, where I go off script to bring you backstage, so to speak.
Two more things about the DWD:
It goes on on the main Dispatches channel, so if you’re looking to spare your inbox from the daily emails without missing out on anything, you can specifically unsubscribe from The Nooner section, and still get the Digest on Sunday.
It’s only available to paid subscribers.
The Dispatches Weekly Digest is a labor of love, and I’m really proud of it, and if you want to hear it, I want you to hear it. So, if you can afford it…
And if you can’t, but you still think of yourself as one of my true fans, let me know and we’ll work something out.
Start writing
Pen or keyboard, paper or word processor, physical notebook, laptop, desktop, tablet, smartphone.
Doesn’t matter.
Start writing, and don’t edit.
Whatever you do, don’t edit.
Because the moment you let the editor out it takes over. It doesn’t let you write any more words before they’ve been reviewed and approved by committee.
And make no mistake, your editor is a committee. It’s your teacher from third grade. It’s your best friend’s dad. It’s your mom when she’s tired and distracted. It’s your barber who doesn’t talk enough so you always overshare and his silence makes you pretty sure you’re an idiot.
So you can’t edit.
You just have to write and write and write and write.
It’s hard to get the words out. Okay. This is a skill. You have to practice, just like everything else.
I give you this advice for the same reason I ever give any advice, because I need to be reminded. I always forget. I always edit. I get slower and slower and I don’t improve, until eventually I give up.
I can’t outlast the committee. It will always win. There are too many of them. Their job is too easy, my job is too hard.
Until I remember this advice:
Don’t edit.
If you don’t start editing, if you rush forward to get the words out as fast as your fingers can move (and so much slower than your mind races but that’s the point, and also the topic for a different post), then you can sideline the editing committee until it’s time for it to take over, which is not while you’re writing, never while you’re writing.
When it’s time to write, you write, you don’t edit, you just keep putting the words down, getting them out, sentence after sentence, paragraph after paragraph, page after page...
Until the writing is done.
Until the draft is finished.
It’s garbage!
That’s fine, that’s as it should be. If it’s not garbage, then the editor showed up too early, and the writing will be stunted, stalled, shrunken. You might finish, you might love it, other people might love it, but you probably won’t finish, you probably won’t love it, other people probably won’t love it.
Either way, it will be far beneath what it could have been if you hadn’t let the committee into the room to oversee the writing.
Think about an artist at a canvas. What if there were a bunch of people standing behind her, telling her which colors to use, no not that one, no redo that line, no you should put the tree over there. Is that even a tree? That doesn’t look like any tree we’ve ever seen. I think we can all agree that this absolutely cannot pass for a tree, can’t we? Wait, slow down, don’t go so fast. In fact, put the brush down until we can determine the next best move. We don’t want to get this wrong, there’s too much at stake.
Any artist who lets the committee into the room too early is ngmi.
Don’t edit.
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