Let’s talk about how fairly often a trilogy happens, and we can delve into some of the issues based off of that. The creator of the story has an idea for one story, maybe more, but one that they know they can get published or produced. So they go to the publisher or producer and sell them on this story and they get it made. Now, it’s a huge success and the publisher or producer comes back to them and asks for more and not just one more, two more of the story or film or whatever it might be. So the creator creates another story picking a spot in the middle for a cliffhanger between both stories and then those are published or produced. However, the second and third don’t do as well. What went wrong?

Now, it could be that there just wasn’t anymore story to tell surrounding certain characters or ideas or even worlds. That can happen, but probably isn’t going to be the biggest issue. Probably as often it happens that the creator didn’t have any more stories to put in that setting and to get something a little bit more out there published or produced, they agree to a multi-thing deal which includes what they are actually interested in creating as well as two things that will be more successful for the company that they signed the deal with. Both of those examples, there really shouldn’t have been a second thing created at all, because there really wasn’t anywhere to go.

But, I think there’s another issue that often befalls trilogies, and that’s their ability to tell a complete story. Pirates of the Caribbean is a great example of this. In the first movie, we get a complete story, we get Jack going from being a pirate down on his luck, getting what he thought he wanted, realizing it wasn’t what he wanted, and overcoming everything in the end. Same with Star Wars: A New Hope, we get a complete story including third act metal ceremony. Then comes along the second film, in particular in Pirates of the Caribbean, less so in the original trilogy (Star Wars). You get the creators knowing that there will be a third film, so they tell part of a story. You get some build, maybe even some change, but in the end, the biggest issue still hasn’t be resolved. Instead, you have to wait for the third film. And that’s fine, if you can watch both films back to back, but most of the time if it’s something you’re really excited about, you’re seeing the film or reading the book when it comes out, not when both are out. So you get the second part which is the start of a story and ends with a small resolution, and the third part which is the continuation of the second part and then the final resolution. So combined you are telling a single story, but both parts are going to leave you feeling a little wanting, unless they are masterfully crafted.

So, how can you get around this in a trilogy? Sometimes you just plan on it being a trilogy. Lord of the Rings is a prime example of this, Fellowship of the Ring doesn’t tell a complete story, Frodo is still going to Mordor, the same with The Two Towers, Frodo is still going to Mordor, and that’s the end of the story (kind of, there are a lot of third acts) when he throws the ring into Mount Doom in Return of the King. However, in each of those, we know there’s the through story line going on with Frodo getting the ring to Mount Doom in Mordor, but we also have other characters getting a story as well and there’s story, especially in Return of the King and The Two Towers that gets told apart from Frodo’s journey that has groundwork laid in earlier books, but finishes up and tells a story there. We have the massive battle between the forces of good and evil in Return of the King which sees Aragorn become King. We have in The Two Towers multiple stories that are told and wrap with Merry, Pippin, and the Ents and the battle of Helms Deep.

Lord of the Rings does two things that should be pointed out. It has a through line so it doesn’t feel like the parts of the trilogy are disconnected. This is the Frodo and Sam story line that they need to get the ring to Mordor and Mount Doom. It’s the key piece of the story and in fact, if they fail, the whole thing fails and that runs throughout all of the books. At the same time with have Gandalf, Aragorn, Merry, Pippin, Gimli, and Legolas doing there own things, making a difference in another part of the world. And even though they aren’t carrying the end game thing, the ring, they still have an important part to play. So we get complete story arcs, from beginning to end, for them in the books and not across all the books, but in each book there is a beginning and ending point.

This varies from my Pirates of the Caribbean example because it has a through line throughout the whole thing, Pirates has characters who repeat but the first movie stands separate from the last two of the original Pirates trilogy. And Lord of the Rings has a beginning, middle and end to each book, versus Pirates 2 & 3 where you have a beginning and middle and a middle and end split respectively.

What does this mean as a creator?

First, a trilogy isn’t the end all for writing, you don’t need it to be a trilogy. The Dresden Files, a series that I love, is on book 17. So you can clearly go longer if you have more story to tell, so don’t let a trilogy limit you. And don’t let the idea of it needing to be a trilogy or anything like that force over complexity and bloat into your stories.

However, if you are going to write a trilogy, or even if you are writing something that you have a bigger idea for, but you just need to get one written and published first, think about through line and think about a complete story. Now, it’s hard if you think that you are only going to get a single shot at creating your idea, but give yourself room. Don’t bloat your idea to fit everything in to a single thing, instead, tell a nice complete story and leave room in the world for there to be even more story. Star Wars, the original trilogy, does this well. You have them blow up the Death Star, that by itself could end the story in A New Hope, however, Vader isn’t killed, so the villain is still out there. If nothing ever came after A New Hope, it wouldn’t feel like it’s missing anything, but it’s natural that we pick back up again with Darth Vader and the Empire. So create a first story, even if you don’t know that you’ll get more like that. Give the main characters a big win but leave a villain out there defeated but not destroyed. That way, you can come back and pick up with the same characters and continue a story.

Also leave plenty of your world unexplored after your first story, especially if you don’t know if there will be more. Lord of the Rings, we get through some mountains, but we know that Mordor is still out there, but we’re not there yet, and there are other lands to explore as well that we haven’t seen or gone to. Star Wars: A New Hope, they really aren’t that many locations and then they have a ton of other planets that they can create and use in future films because they didn’t have them hop from planet to planet all the time. This gives you room to create more mystery and more adventures in which to tell your complete adventure. Pirates of the Caribbean really feels like it hits up so many locations in the first film, even though it’s somewhat limited, so you don’t feel like there are a lot of players left to join the story in this small world they’ve created, as compare to Lord of the Rings and Star Wars where who knows what new enemies or allies might be out there.

Now, I’m sure there are more things out there that you can do when creating a trilogy. I do want to wrap up with that I’m not trying to bash on trilogies. I think fairly often they can work. The original Star Wars trilogy and Lord of the Rings are great examples of this. Even The Hunger Games, which I didn’t talk about much, does a good job of making the 1st and the 3rd stand separate as their own stories. But don’t limit yourself to that if you want to create an epic, and tell a complete story each time, those are just my rules for writing a series or trilogy.

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So, what is a LitRPG book?

LitRPG is a novel where it takes place in a world where there are statistics for the characters, like you would in an RPG. This can either be split between the real world and a game world, like Ascend Online and Awaken Online, or it can be a world that just happens to have RPG like rules, which you get in Towers of Heaven (though that kind of walks the line between the two) and Sufficiently Advanced Magic. In these books, you see the characters clearly leveling up and becoming better at things, gaining new skills, and getting new quests (fairly often). The quests is more obviously laid out in the ones where they actually go into an RPG, but the other ones really do the same thing as well.

LitRPG is a really easy and obvious way to do the heroes journey as you have that marker of progression for the character, and if the character is good, eventually they’ll be able to do more and more good. Now, you also have books like the first one in the Awaken Online series where the characters aren’t good, but might, in fact, be the villain of the piece if you really look at it. But if you don’t consider them going that far, they become an edge lord. I have mentioned the term before, but an edge lord is a character who is supposed to be the bad boy and edgy. I highly recommend not doing an edge lord character if you decided to write litRPG, because it seems like a wish fulfillment and often then leads to stupid situations just for fulfilling some wish of the author.

Now, LitRPG has also moved into other mediums. I actually think LitRPG most likely started in Japan, though you could argue that D&D Novels might have been the original. Manga and Anime like Is It Wrong to Pick Up A Girl in a Dungeon? and Sword Art Online are examples of LitRPG or LitJRPG that have been around for a little while. Is It Wrong to Pick Up A Girl in a Dungeon? is an example of an anime where the world itself has RPG rules to it, and Sword Art Online goes between the real world and various game worlds. It’s interesting to see how popular that these anime are or aren’t, but personally I find them both enjoyable.

So, what makes a good LitRPG?

I think that there are a few things to look for. First, you can often tell within the first few minutes or pages if the book has some sort of fulfillment edge lord fantasy feel to it. This will often be done by creating situations of unnecessary violence or hits of things of a sexual nature. This has happened in a few times when I started listening to something and I could tell quickly that it was going to be a situation where we were going to end up with an edge lord.

I also think that you can tell the quality of the writing pretty quickly by how they use descriptions or dialogue. I’ve noticed that some of the writers, since a lot seem to have originally been self published, don’t structure their books in the best way. I talked about this in my world building article, but don’t spend the first few chapters or third or whatever of the book explaining your world to me. Show me and also give me plot at the same time. If you can’t do that, I’m probably going to set down your book. And the same with dialogue or maybe more so with relationships. Know your strong points in writing. Also, be careful what point of view you use.

Also, when creating LitRPG works, have your system figured out and dispense some of the information for leveling up, things like that into your book. But don’t lean too heavily into the trope of the pop-up messages in your screen of how much damage you take or when a skill upgrades. You can show us a character sheet once in a while. I think that this is less annoying in the written form, but when I’ve been listening to things on an audio book, it really wrecks the feel you’re trying to create for the world and the characters.

Finally, have your story cohesive. People are familiar with RPG’s, you often have one quest and then another and then another, and eventually you might tie them all together, but you’ve been playing for a year now and you’ve lost one of your story threads along the way at some point, so that’s fine. But in a book, I can listen to even some of the longer LitRPG books in a week or maybe two. So that means the thread that you lost, because you might actually be pulling from your own pen and paper RPG, or just because you didn’t keep enough notes in your writing, it’s obvious to me. And if you’re doing it intentionally, don’t. It might feel thematic, but you’re writing, and like the character sheet, those things that you don’t notice in a pen and paper RPG are very obvious in a LitRPG book.

And let me do a finally, finally and say this. LitRPG is a ton of fun, I’ve been enjoying what I’ve been listening to. It has been making me want to play more D&D and write my own LitRPG, but please, people, please, if you are going to write something and self publish it on Amazon or somewhere, please hire and editor. Or at least have some friends who aren’t going to be Yes Men read the story and give you feedback. In Ascend Online, he needs someone to edit his content because he isn’t great at description so uses words over and over again. If the Sufficiently Advanced Magic writer had a good editor, they could have fixed the bad romantic language that the author tried to add to the book. And really, this isn’t just for litRPG, but please use a good editor people.

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So that we’re all talking about things from the same starting point, I want to introduce a concept that I think is important in this season of Stranger Things and that isn’t there in other seasons. This is the writing concept, but also works in other creative mediums, that you don’t want to show your audience the gears, the workings behind what you are doing. To explain this further, in a good book, the story can seamlessly transition between multiple characters having their moment or finding the information that they need (for a mystery sort of story) and it feels like it’s all part of the same story. When you start to see the gears, you can tell when it’s going to be one characters turn to be hero or the focal point, because the other characters change to foil or background roles. The story lacks that smooth storytelling consistency that you expect.

If I’m introducing this concept, that clearly means that I think that Stranger Things Season 3 suffers from this. And that would be correct. I think in a few of the relationships or pairings, Joyce and Hopper and Lucas, Mike, Max, and El it is really notable. There are almost moments where it seems like the character changes from what they were before to match what they needed for this season. This might get a little bit spoilery here, but you might have seen online about them messing up Hopper in some people’s opinions. And, I can see why people say that and in some ways that I agree with it.

In this season, Hopper is much more aggressive or angry, and I think that there are several reasons for this, but I also think that they are a bit heavy handed with it. The reason that I think it can work is because Hopper has closed himself off or a long time from feeling. And now with Eleven, he is starting to feel again, but it isn’t just the happy emotions, it’s the hard emotions, and he reacts strongly to feeling those again. He isn’t able to fully process them, but, like I said, I think that it done with a heavy hand too often. It became his personality, being the angry person, instead of having more of a complex character. And sometimes, it’s so that you can see the gears working to set-up a moment for Joyce.

With both groups, Joyce and Hopper and Mike, Lucas, Max, and Eleven, their stories are taken to the extreme reaction of things. And when it’s more extreme, you start to lose the depth of character that was created to them in previous seasons. That isn’t to say that it wouldn’t be easy to bring it back in a future season, but the writing was done to give everyone their moment, but done too obviously. Compare that to Dustin, Steve, Robin, and a surprise character, and their banter and relationships are done so extremely well. The actor who plays Steve, Joe Keery, is really good, and does a good job of playing what is now a caring but also still wanting to be popular character. He went from a jerk in the first season without much depth to a character who has a ton of depth and interest now, as compared to some of the others who are working backwards from that this season.

But let’s talk some about the whole story and the monsters. I actually really liked the season as whole, even with some rough spots with various character groups. What makes it work pretty well, in my opinion, is that you get a human aspect to a larger extent as a bad guy, like you did in season one, but you still have that upside down and monster feel. The big addition of another evil organization works really well, but what is that organization. I will say that Cary Elwes as the mayor only works so well. The main issue is that he’s clearly putting on an American accent and it’s obvious. Most of the time it isn’t an issue, but it just doesn’t work as well as it could have, which is a shame, because I like Cary Elwes, especially in Psych. This season, to me, felt a bit more like highlights of 1980’s tropes, as well. While, at times it felt a bit heavy handed with that, what they started with and how it ended, it actually worked well and made sense. I also really like where they ended the season. I’m not going to go into spoilers, but they are setting it up for season four to be a story that is potentially bigger than just Hawkins, which feels like what they need to do at this point.

Overall, I really enjoyed this season. I just think, especially early in the season, there are some things that a writer can take from the story as to what not to do. But you can also take good things from it, like how to use period piece references so it’s not too heavy handed, so like the 80’s references, versus the too heavy a hand in Captain Marvel with 90’s references. I’m at the point with Stranger Things, though, I hope that they start writing seasons that they are going to be their last, they could probably run the show for a few more seasons, but, it feels like a story that should be wrapping up soon, and while still really good, a story that I don’t want to overstay it’s welcome or overstep, like it did with the book that I trashed in review before.

What did you think of season three? Were there any fun surprises in it for you, who was your favorite character from the season?

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The first is by duplicating description in the same sentence. or using too much description.

The second is by using large words for the sake of large words.

A couple of examples form books that I started reading and then quit, and one that I am actually continuing.

“The trials are our exegesis…” – A Warriors Path by Davis Ashura

“While thinking internally to myself…” – Ascend Online by Luke Chmilenko

Let’s talk about why these are poor. First, using “exegesis” in a sentence, and I shared this with a co-worker who reads a lot, is not a common word that people know. Learning new words isn’t bad, but there weren’t context clues to provide the answer to what it means. So someone would have to stop reading your book to look it up if they don’t know the meaning. And why weren’t there context clues, because this was sentence number one in the book.

I know what “exegesis” means, and because it was the first sentence, I immediately stopped listening to the book. What the first sentence tells me about the book is that it’s going to be using a lot of big words for the sake of using big words. And it’s supposed to be an epic fantasy book, premise seemed interesting, but if, in one sentence, it feels like the writer is shooting for showing off their knowledge of the English language, it isn’t ideal.

The second example is really about that first one, giving too much description. “Thinking internally” is a redundant statement. Besides that, the Ascend Online book, which isn’t bad thus far, spends too much time going through the fine details of the RPG aspect of a LitRPG. That can be done at the start, but then needs to fade to the background and that’s another way it is overwritten. It doesn’t just imply some things that the writer knows are happening in the background, but instead spells them out in great detail. This is something that happened in the Arcane Ascension series, where the writer would spend too much time explaining something that the characters already know for the sake of the reader.

So how can you avoid overwriting a story?

I think the biggest thing you can do is be a harsh critic of your own work. Not of yourself, but taking a step back from the work, look at it and ask yourself, is this part needed, or is this from a different story that I just haven’t written yet. Just because you’re cutting something, doesn’t mean that it wasn’t good, it just might not be for this story.

Along with that, ask yourself if you need to spell that out for the reader or how easily the reader can understand it. If you feel like a reader can infer what is being written about, for example, when leveling up in a LitRPG, if you’re in a video game, like Ascend Online is, have there be a noise, like a ding, when a skill levels up. As a reader, I’ll know that whatever skill was used immediately prior to the “ding” leveled up, the author doesn’t need to tell me that metal working leveled up when you were just working with metal, that should be obvious to any reader, and if the reader missed if, they know from the “ding” to look back at the previous action to see what it was. Doing something as simple as that will make the story flow better.

Ask yourself, is all this backstory/world building needed at the beginning? That’s another piece of overwriting that I see very often. It falls into the camp of too much description, but ask yourself where and when you need the backstory and world building. Too much of it is front loaded, instead, put it in when it is needed. I suspect what you’ll find, even if you had it front loaded before, is that when you reach the end of the story, there will be world details that still haven’t been put into the story, and that’s awesome. That means you’ve found the parts that were overwritten and don’t matter to your story. Also, by interweaving the backstory and world building into the main body of the story, I, as a reader, am more apt to remember them as if they are all at the beginning, I might just skim over them to get to the action.

The other thing that is often forgotten in LitRPG or with self published writing, is use an editor and copy-editor. The copy-editor is going to cut down on grammar and spelling issues, so not as important for overwriting, but the editor is the person who is going to track down those overwritten bits, question why there is so much detail or why you are using a word. They are going to be harsher on your writing than you will be able to ever be. With that, it’s important that, even if you have a friend who likes to read and is good with English, don’t use them as your editor. They aren’t going to be able to be as harsh on the work as it might need to be, because they know you. I feel like I’ve read several books where they had some editing work done, but the author either refused to trust their editor, or the editor was a friend. So there’s another thing, the editor wants you book to succeed, even if you don’t know them, because they want more work from you. When they suggest cutting something that you really liked, it isn’t because they hate you or what you wrote, it’s because they genuinely should care about helping you make the best book. So find an editor that you can trust who isn’t your friend.

Obviously, there is more that you can do, but let’s spend a little bit of time looking at some books that I really do like.

The Dresden Files – I don’t think these are overwritten. My reasoning for that is because Jim Butcher gives you enough detail but not too much and he doesn’t spend any time at the start of any books explaining something about his world that is going to show up later. There are points where as a reader, I feel like between books he’s repeating himself, but if someone was reading them once and as they came out, they probably would need that reminder. Since I’m reading them after the fact and in a row, I wish it wasn’t there, but it is smart that it is there.

Lord of the Rings – Tom Bombadil. That’s all that I need to say, JRR Tolkien had some stuff that he wanted to get into the book and added to the book that is most certainly not needed. Tom Bombadil was cut from the movies for a reason, and probably should have been cut from the book. I’ll give him some slack for the time frame, but Tolkien does overwrite, and when you think about The Silmarillion, you can see how much he cut and had in backstory that he decided to publish separately, thankfully.

Chronicles of Narnia – I think that this is another example of something that isn’t overwritten. CS Lewis does a good job keeping his series short and to the point in each book. There are a few bits that haven’t always aged the best, but that isn’t an overwriting problem, so not an issue for here. From The Lion, The Witch, and the Wardrobe, through The Last Battle, you get the information you need when you need it and the stories are on point. You could argue that The Magician’s Nephew is simply a book of backstory, but it is fairly important backstory for the world, and the book reads as a novel onto itself with plenty of action and interesting moments versus just an explanation of how the world works.

What are some book series that you think are overwritten? Are there some sentences that are really poorly written, if so, share them below, please, I love weird stuff like that.

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I think the idea that all the stories have been told is false, but I’ll explain what I mean with that later. First, let’s break down the idea of a story a little bit. A story tells something as we follow a character or characters around and see how they interact with the world that they have been placed. These stories generally boil down to a handful of concepts, dealing with death, love, overcoming a monster, rags to riches, and a few more. So it might be correct to say that all the stories have been told, once the seven or so different basic plots have been told, is there a need for more or a need for something new.

Now, obviously I’ve already stated that I think this answer is yes. There is a need for more things to be written, having a few basic plots and stories with those plots is nice, and they can help ground your work as you realize what type of story you are trying to tell, but there’s more to a story than just a basic plot. There are several reasons why all the stories haven’t been told and even if the basic plots have been told a million times before, there are reasons to keep writing them.

The story you are telling is yours. This first reason is one of the biggest to keep writing a story with a plot that has been done before. You are writing a story in the way that only you could tell that story. I couldn’t write the same story that you are writing, you couldn’t write the same story that I might write. That’s because every single human being is shaped differently from any other human. You might have grown up in a very liberal or conservative town, you might have grown up in an urban area or in a rural area, you might like spaghetti and not chocolate. Some of these things might be bigger in shaping you, but everything about you shapes the story that you are telling. For that reason, whatever you write is going to be uniquely you. It is going to be a voice that is written in a unique way that can only be written by you.

The story you are telling is not yours. Now, this clearly contradicts the first point. But I’d argue that both of them are true. While the story you are writing can only be written by you,  you are not writing it only for you. Now, maybe it is a story that is never published and only you ever read it, but you are still not just writing it only for you. You are writing it to release it from you and to send it out into the world on it’s own. Even if that world is just the hard drive of your computer, when the words are down on the paper, they are separate from you. This id a difficult process a lot of the time, you want your story to be yours and to have everyone see it the way that you did. If you get the chance to put something out there, people are going to read it differently than you thought they would. I’m going to repeat that, other people are going to read your writing differently than you intended. And that is great. Go back to the first point that I made about why you should write, the same is true for the reader, everyone comes from a different spot. However, people reading it differently is a good thing. These people are getting something out of your story that is meaningful to them that they might not have gotten out of any story, even if it isn’t what you had thought it would be. That is another reason to tell a story, even if the plot has already been done before.

Stories have a time and place. While there are some stories that hold up to the test of time, Lord of the Rings for example, or are at least considered classics that people should read, there are a lot of stories that don’t. Twenty years from now, heck, even now, people aren’t talking about Dan Brown and his literary prowess. That’s because he isn’t a good writer, and while I would argue that his books haven’t impacted anyone deeply, I do think that people read his writing and most likely it’s encouraged some people to take up writing. The hope, always, is to write the next Lord of the Rings that stands the test of time, but if you don’t, that doesn’t mean that you shouldn’t have written it. There are certain books that will hold a place as something important for a given time or a certain place. Even a certain person might be influenced by your book. So while there are great books out there in every plot, if you adhere to the basic 7 plots, there is a time and a place for what you might be writing. And it is a way that you can hit on something for a certain time or place that a classic couldn’t because they aren’t part of that time or place.

Finally, Every Story is Unique. This ties back into a number of the other things, in particular the first one, but I wanted to talk about it in a different light. While your story might be about love, there’s never been a story written about the alien race of the Snarblax who are looking to conquer the universe in hopes of finding their supreme leaders true love who the oracle computer of the Bathari planet calculated must be out there. Sure, the story is about finding love and possibly then losing love, but everything else about it is uniquely mine. The places, people, and things of the world are uniquely yours, and that is why 200 people can be finishing up a story on love each day (or whatever numbers might be) and each publishing.A story about love or about death could be fantasy, sci-fi, historical fiction, alternate reality, a mystery, thriller, horror, romance, and each one of those is different from the other.

So, has every plot been written, sure? If you subscribe to there being seven unique plots, they have all been written. But the story that you are telling is uniquely yours and deserves to be told. Don’t feel like it might be redundant or that it might not matter, whatever story you write, no matter how long or short will impact someone, even if it is just yourself getting the idea down onto the paper, it will shape who you are for the future.

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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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