I just wrote a bunch of words for Avalon Summer (my work-in-progress novella that’s part-memoir, part-fantasy), and now I want to erase them all. Part of me is mad: mad at myself for writing such garbage, for wasting time, for not having enough good ideas. Part of me is trying to salvage them with unconvincing excuses: “Maybe it’s not that bad. Maybe I’m just being a perfectionist. Maybe if I keep going, it’ll all work out fine.”

And then there’s the part of me that knows what needs to be done and is struggling to stay level-headed and cool about the whole thing. What needs to be done is this: I need to cut those words and start over. I need to rethink the scene and try something different. The calm, collected, level-headed part of me is saying, “Hey, no worries. It was an experiment. It was a bit of a ramble down an unbeaten path, but it didn’t work out. Time to turn around and go in a different direction.”

But then the angry, frustrated part of me is on the other shoulder whispering feverishly: “You suck, you suck, you suck, you suck!”

‘Cause the perfectionist, the doubter, the critic are all hidden away inside my head, and the critic loves nothing more than to point out my failures. Let’s face it, the words I wrote the other day are “failures.” They’re not good. They need to be cut. They’re not gonna end up in the book. And the critic doesn’t want me to forget. I wasted my time. I wrote something crappy. I’m a bad writer because only bad writers ever write anything bad.

And on and on and on goes the perfectionist, the doubter, the critic.

This is the struggle, right here. This is what makes it hard. I KNOW that this bit of bad writing is not a big deal. I know it. I know that it’s all part of the creative process. I almost always do better when I can ramble and sometimes get lost, because the other method, the planning everything out method, kills my creativity and energy. It stops me from writing because once I know where the story is going, I lose interest. I’m a “discovery writer,” which means I get to discover, and that means sometimes there will be wrong turns. I know this. My cool, level-headed self knows this.

And yet it’s hard to kill the critic. It’s hard to block out the pessimistic voice that says, “You just wasted all that time writing to a dead-end. What a failure! What a fool!”

I know I need to silence that critic. Problem is: I’m not sure HOW to silence that critic.