In honor of NaNo, I’ve decided to talk about some tips for beating that tenacious and persnickety beast known as the inner editor. As a moonlighting copyeditor, my inner editor is extremely useful, but when it comes to my own writing, she tends to trip me up abominably, and has been the cause of death for more abandoned stories than I care to admit.

My inner editor is one of the biggest obstacles I face during NaNo, so I want to share some things I’ve learned that help me keep her quiet, at least for a little while. If you’re tackling NaNo this year, whether for the first time or the fifth, I hope you’ll find them useful too!

Use an online writing tool

This is one of the more fun (and less psychologically fraught) ways to keep yourself chugging along. There are tons of writing tools on the internet, many of them free. My personal favorite is Written? Kitten! After you hit your pre-chosen word count (from 100 to 1000 words), the site shows you a picture of a cute kitten! I recommend copying and pasting your work into your primary document to save it often, since you’re just writing in a text box in this site, but it’s a way to keep yourself on task that’s both fun and delightfully silly.

If you’re looking for something even more minimalist and straightforward, apps and sites like ZenPen, Omm Writer, Quiet Writer, and Writer are just a few of the many great choices out there. They allow you to write within a stark, clean space that has as few buttons, options, and other distractions as possible.

I recommend tools like these because, in stripping away all the fluff and setting mini-goals for yourself, all you need to focus on is getting those words on the page, and not about whether a story is springing forth fully formed like Athena from Zeus’s head.

Bite it off in smaller chunks

When I sit down to work on my daily NaNo writing, I often feel as though I have to finish all 1,667 words in one sitting. Not so! If I work in chunks of 20 or 30 minutes, with breaks of a few minutes in between, the whole thing feels a lot more manageable, and might even get done faster. It can also help me maintain the stamina I need to keep writing in spite of my inner editor’s noisiness — it’s a whole lot easier to fend her off for 20-minute bursts than 2-hour slogs.

Resist the urge to check social media every two sentences

No but for real, you guys, RESIST. IT. You may not think this one has anything to do with your inner editor, but believe you me, it does. Part of my problem with this is due to the fact that I have the attention span of a twitchy housecat, but the other is that the very second I start to deliberate as I’m typing along, or I think, “Hmm…is that really the best way to say this?”, my focus breaks, and I immediately want to trawl Facebook or Pinterest or some other time-sucking site, and end up losing a good 20 minutes or more. And I’m serious when I say immediately. Don’t believe me? I just did it while writing this very post!! I am the actual worst.

Anyway, the moral is that this is a really easy way to lose a lot of time, and a really important thing to avoid. And once you’ve resisted the urge two or three times, you’ll be in the zone anyway and you won’t have to fight it off as much. So do what you have to do — have someone sit near you and tell you to get off Facebook, install a browser add-on that limits or blocks your access to time-wasting sites, write on a typewriter…whatever it takes to push through that impulse to quit the second the going gets rough!

Remember that done is better than perfect

Out of all of the things on this list, I think this one is key. As writers, a lot of us are convinced that everything we write must be beautiful and arresting and perfect the second it leaves our brains and hits the page, but the reality is that no one writes like this. No one! Did you hear me? I’ll say it again — NO ONE! It’s okay if your first draft is not Pulitzer prize-worthy. That’s what first drafts are for! So don’t overthink it — just write. Don’t reread what you wrote last time every time you sit down to write again. Don’t change anything until you’re done, even if what you wrote in Chapter 1 no longer makes sense in Chapter 10. Don’t even worry about grammar and spelling right now. Challenge yourself to write the crappiest first draft possible, if you have to. Just get those words on the page! Get that raw lump of clay all prepped and ready to be molded into something beautiful later on. Just keep. on. going! And I promise, everything else will eventually fall into place.

These are just a few things that I try to do to keep that darn inner editor quiet for at least a little while (it’s a work in progress, but we’re getting there!). What are some of your tips and tricks for staying on target during NaNo, or whenever you sit down to write? Tell us about them in the comments — you just might help a fellow writer out!

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So, let me start out by saying that I’m no expert when it comes to writing fantasy. I haven’t been published, and there are some good writers out there, like Patrick Rothfuss, who writes the Kingkiller Chronicles, and Tony Lee, who writes comic books, who sometimes tweet out advice and answer questions about the process of writing. However, I’m going to try to help give people motivation to work on that project they haven’t worked on in a while, and to share ideas and tips that have been helpful to me when I write.

Fantasy is an interesting genre to work in, since there are so many different subgenres within it. You could be writing a story about steampunk robots who just want to learn to love, or about a scrappy band of goblins who are trying to stop the world from ending. Your story could be set in ancient China, or it could be an urban fantasy set in the New York City underground. It could be about a world-ending disaster that has to be stopped, dragons that are terrorizing the land and creating the need for a hero, or a love story between two people/beings that should never work. Narrowing down what you want to do seems like it would be about the hardest part of starting a fantasy story.

But you can make this aspect a bit easier — start with what you already know you like to read. From there, you can figure out what you’d want to write about. For example, I’m currently working on an epic adventure involving dragons, witches, and a kingdom that needs saving from its inevitable fall to those dragons and witches. So clearly, I have a thing for epic fantasy. Looking at what I’ve read, I can see that quite quickly — for example, I’ve enjoyed reading high-concept fantasy series like Lord of the Rings, The Wheel of Time, The Stormlight Archive, the aforementioned Kingkiller Chronicles, and my least favorite of this bunch, A Song of Ice and Fire. Just from knowing what I like to read, and by thinking about the books and series that I’ve enjoyed, I can start to shape my world. Also, playing Dungeons & Dragons helps keep that itch for creating epic fantasy going.

The next thing that I think most people, including myself, run into, is getting bogged down in the fact that your first draft isn’t amazing. It’s hard to keep writing when you suddenly remember where you put something in 2,000 words ago that now you are regretting, and there is temptation to go back over those first two or three chapters until they are perfect. Don’t fall into that trap. Keep writing; keep pushing through. You know how you get better at writing? You got it — writing. Get the words down on the paper, and if you are having trouble getting through your epic story that is going to span a trilogy and spawn great offshoot series, write something shorter. Get completed works down on paper or up on Google Docs.

There are a couple of reasons for not self-editing as you go along. The first is that it takes you out of your story and your flow. It takes a little bit of time to get into the mindset of the characters in your world, and when you keep on getting distracted by a missing comma or a line of dialogue that doesn’t sound quite perfect, you take your mind out of the world you are trying to build. The other reason is that it simply helps you finish your story. The second, third, fourth, and seventh drafts are for cleaning up mistakes if you still think you have a solid story (or even if you don’t think you do).

Now, getting and keeping proper motivation, even for a short story, can be tricky at times. So how do you do that, even when you aren’t self-editing and you aren’t trying to write the next Song of Ice and Fire? One way that I would recommend, and which I did in 2013 and 2014, is to do National Novel Writing Month, or NaNoWriMo for short. The object of NaNoWriMo is to write a 50,000-word story in the month of November. It’s tricky to do, but you’ll be doing it along with thousands of other people across the country. Or if November is always a busy month for you, find someone else who wants to write, and have them as an accountability partner to keep both of you making progress.

Basically, the important thing is to always move forward. Seems simple enough, but too often, we go in with the grand plan of writing 1,500 or 5,000 or some other large number of words per day. And ideally, you set aside a time every day to write, but more importantly, you’re always moving forward, even if it’s just by a little. Every week, you should see that your word count has gone up — and don’t worry so much about the number of words it has increased by; just make sure that it has simply increased.

Now that you know what genres of fantasy (or really any type of book) you like to read, what story can you tell that is set in that genre? Are you going to tell the story of a pulpy detective who is as dishonest as he seems, the romance of two aliens from a far-off land, a starlet who has gotten to where she is by using magic, or what? It’s time to start putting pen to paper or fingers to keyboard and writing.

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