As I wander my way through this month’s NaNoWriMo writing, there are days when I would be making better time if I could ignore the whispers that keep reminding me the energy isn’t being well spent — that even when revised, the end result isn’t going to be worth the effort.
This week I remembered a post I wrote back in 2009, and I decided this would be a very good time to pull it out of the archives. I need the reminding, and I hope you’ll find it useful, too.
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Some days the grouch inside me can turn me into an unpleasant-to-be-around whiner. Those are the days you hear me muttering at the computer screen as if the words thereon are animate: “What’s the matter with you? Can’t you see that isn’t what I intended to say at all? Get it right, for Pete’s sake!” The words never answer back. They just sit there and leer at me.
On her original blog, my friend Earlene once talked about the creative “entities” that invade a writer’s mind. When the wrong ones gain control and squelch our dreams, we don’t achieve our goals. In fact, a little of our writing spirit is destroyed every time they even knock at the mind’s door.
Among such beings is every writer’s voice of doom, the I.E., or Internal Editor—the nagging voice that constantly reminds us we don’t know how to write, everything we’ve written so far is garbage, and the project is destined to be a failure.
So what do we do about it? Most aspiring authors recognize that we all suffer from a form of split personality, where one part of our minds is full of developing characters anxious to take on a life of their own. We welcome them as an important part of our story planning.
It is the negative voices on the other side, the procrastinating urges, and the don’t-write-until-the-concept-is-perfect impulses that we have to recognize and snuff out — whap them smartly with a wet blanket until no embers remain.
Otherwise the tendency will be to hesitate, to falter, to be discouraged. Then our writing ceases and we blame it on Writer’s Block. We wait it out, hoping Ms. Muse will miraculously return to our office, but it rarely happens, or at least not as quickly as we wish.
IMHO, there’s no half measure. Either we take control or we lose it, perhaps to one of those unworthy entities. And truly, I don’t want one of them authoring my books!
(With apologies to my granddaughter for stealing her photos!)
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MUSINGS 
I remember this post. My hair was still brown. Okay, that’s not important, except along with that brown hair, my attitude wasn’t always compliant. Hope the nano monster is being kind to you. The fact you took time to repost this is amazing.