I recently re-read a blogpost by Pat Thomson on helping your inner editor and creator to get along after being reminded of this idea by a doctoral researcher. The naming and description of these roles – Editor and Creator – are attributed to Joni B Cole. I think of my own Editor and Creator as little characters on each shoulder, looking over at my keyboard as I (try to) write. They are almost always talking at the same time, telling me different things about what I should be doing, how I should be writing, whether my writing is any good. On the good writing days, they get along pretty well; on the tough writing days the conversation is quite loud and chaotic, and confusing. It makes getting ahead with the writing hard and more often than not I stop, give up, and get behind my own plans and schedules.

This post is focused on thinking about how and when and why we shift modes between our own Editor and Creator, and will hopefully enable you to start to listen more carefully, make conscious decisions about your own writing process, and feel more in control as you shift modes between creating and editing. It also contains an exercise you can try that I’ve been using to great effect recently in my own effort to bring my Creator online in writing new papers.

A metaphor I have used before to think about creating and editing is potting, or making ceramics. In the process of creating a piece of new writing and then working iteratively to revise and polish it into a shareable artefact, we play different roles as ‘potters’. We start with a lump of clay and an idea, more or less loosely formed. This has to be made into a recognisable form – a pot, a plate, a vase, a mug; in a piece of writing, we make bigger and smaller arguments, and take on bigger and smaller projects. This process is also undertaken using different tools; as there are many ways to make a piece of pottery, there are different approaches to making a contribution to knowledge – textual, visual, physical, collaborative, and more. Once we have the basic shape – the basic plan for the contribution – this has to be revised, polished, edited and worked on further to get it ready to share with our target audience.

So we start with and go back at points to the Creator, who needs to be given fairly free reign, especially as the project starts and at points of generation (of content, ideas, and so on). The Creator plans, makes a skeleton for the project, thinks about possible angles we could take and then jumps in, putting words to paper (or similar if you are creating in other ways) without too much concern just yet for their ‘correctness’ or for any form of ‘perfection’. We’re just trying to get the basic form outlined and created so we have a good base to work with. At this point, the Editor is not online and needs to be kept at bay. If we start editing too soon, we undermine the process of creation, the freer thinking, and we may feel stifled, frustrated, stuck. If you think about times when you started writing and got frustrated really quickly and unable to move forward, ask yourself: did I start worrying about things like punctuation, word choice, the exactness of the reference details? If you did, you probably brought your Editor online too soon.

*Tip here: if you are creating and know where you will need references, type (XXX) in brackets and keep creating. You can then search for XXX later and put in the correct referencing details.

Once we have created something – a chunk of writing that feels fairly coherent to us, or a piece that we cannot get any further on right now, we start listening to the Editor, and shush the Creator for a little while. The Editor is not looking to generate ideas with less care for form and structure; the Editor is actively looking for sense and meaning. Does this make sense? Are there links between my ideas here and are the ideas in a logical or coherent order in terms of building the meanings I am after? If I read aloud (or get Word or a similar AI tool to read it to me), does it read smoothly – is all the punctuation in the right places? We are adding references in place of XXX or similar placeholder text, we are correcting typos, spelling errors and grammatical missteps, we are deleting words and sentences we don’t need and making changes for clarity and brevity, we are adding little bits and pieces (of evidence, elaboration, etc.) to create meanings. This is a different task, for me, than Creating proper, because I am moving my ideas/the writing/the task I am working on onto one track, and the editing and revising work is to ensure this track is clear and evident to me, and to a reader.

Of course, as I edit and revise my writing, I do find the Creator stepping forward in response to a need to add another paragraph, move sections and create new links, and then when I am ready to move forward to generate the next part of the piece I am writing. It is not always easy to have one fully offline and quiet while the other is working. As I am writing this blogpost, I am actively pushing the Editor back from editing punctuation, changing words and trimming sentences: I can do that in a few minutes when the idea for this paragraph is written down. This work – the work of balancing time and focus between your Editor and Creator – needs to be made conscious; you need to actively stop the Editor from shortcutting the creative process by worrying too soon about structure, organisation and so on. It is more often than not, for me, my Editor that needs to be held back, rather than my Creator. More often, the Creator needs to be allowed to be freer, and more loose with ideas, generative writing, playing with ideas and words.

*Tip here: Using pre-writing planning techniques may help you if you find starting with a completely blank page hard to do. Start with a skeleton or basic plan with holding texts, and build on these. This is one way to get your Editor and Creator working together more effectively.

Ultimately, having a careful think about your own writing process – becoming a more conscious writer in terms of the meta-level processes you use to create, edit and produce written (and other forms of) text is an important part of becoming a more productive writing, certainly, but more than that, of becoming a happier writer who finds joy and satisfaction in the work.

The exercise I promised: Loop writing

Loop writing is a fantastic tool for generative writing – for creating. The main part of this is freewriting, whichg means writing without worrying about punctuation, grammar, form, etc. and without stopping until the timer dings. If you do get stuck, rewrite the last word over and over until the ideas flow again. I strongly recommend handwriting rather than typing, so you don’t give the Editor red and blue squiggles to stress over as you try to create. The steps for a set of 4 loops, with timings are below.

Loop 1: Choose a prompt to write to (examples: What is my main focus in this piece? What is the context for this research? What is my research design about?). Set a timer for 5 minutes and just write. When the timer stops, come to the end of the thought and stop writing. Read what you have written and summarise the main point or theme of the writing in one sentence.

Loop 2: Set the timer for 5 minutes again, and just write, but this time to the prompt contained in your summary sentence. Expand on this, elaborate, go into more detail. Again, freewriting, so no stopping or judging. At the end of the time, finish your sentence and repeat the read and summarise-in-a-sentence step.

Loop 3: Repeat Loop 2

Loop 4: Repeat Loop 3.

This should take about 30 minutes and if you’re on a productive roll, add more loops. You’ll be amazed at how much writing you can generate, but rather than just producing random text, you’ll find your ideas becoming refined, sharper, more focused as you create more and more focused prompts for yourself. Give it a try and let me know in the comments how you find it!