How I Finally Shut up My Inner Critic During Writing
By: Judith Valentijn
Tags: Writing, Creativity, Productivity, Writing Tips, Self

How I Finally Shut up My Inner Critic During Writing

“The Most Dangerous Writing App” forces you to keep going

Photo by Windows on Unsplash

Even though I love writing, the process can be frustratingly painful. While I’m struggling to get the story out, my inner critic reads along over my shoulder and has an opinion about everything.

That paragraph is too long.

That word looks weird; you should Google for synonyms.

This sentence is too vague? What are you trying to say? Why do you use question marks like that?

You are not convincing anyone with that statement.

I am sure there are another 100 articles about this subject, all better than yours. Maybe you should read all of them, now?

You are going overboard with the alliterations.

You should stop typing until you come up with the best subheading EVER.

That reference is too obscure; no one knows what “thanks, I stole them from the president” means.

This paragraph feels more like a closing paragraph, so why are you writing it after your second paragraph? You need more flesh in the middle!

That is too much flesh. Delete half of it.

My inner critic likes to go on and on like that. And every time they make me question what I’m writing, I lose my flow, and my voice becomes forced.

Always separate writing and editing

I am not the first writer struggling with her inner critic, which is why it is a piece of common advice to separate your editing from your writing.

No first draft is perfect; you need that shitty first draft to get your thoughts on paper and then edit them. Quite early on in my writing journey, I discovered that simultaneously editing and writing waters down my message. My inner critic thinks it is helping me, but instead, it is making my writing worse.

But knowing and doing are two separate things. No matter how many Pomodoro timers I use or how often I tell my inner critic to hold their horses, I can’t resist going back to edit. This usually ends with me with my hands in my hair — or worse, on my mobile phone playing Candy Crush — annoyed with losing my flow of thought and questioning every word I write.

The Most Dangerous Writing App

Last week, I decided it was finally time to try the notorious Most Dangerous Writing App (TMDWA). The concept is simple: this online distraction-free editor deletes your work if you stop typing.

You’ve read that right. If you write two beautiful paragraphs and let your inner critic take you hostage on paragraph #3, you lose it all. Before you start writing, you set a timer. If you keep typing until the timer goes off, your work is safe.

For my first try, I’d set the timer for five minutes, and I immediately felt the pressure and started typing like a mad person. My fingers kept missing keys, so the first couple of lines were nothing more than a random assortment of typos.

The Most Dangerous Writing App doesn’t force you to go fast; it just wants you to keep going. I slowed down, and within a couple of keystrokes, I found my rhythm, and the last three minutes flew by. I didn’t hear my inner critic once because there was no time to pause for its bullshit.

The result? Four paragraphs with a clear point — and the most typos I’ve ever seen in my writing.

For my second round, I set the timer for ten minutes and experienced some of the most effortless writing I’ve ever done. Because the goal is to keep going, I worried less about quality. All I had to do is get the words out and shut out my inner critic.

My inner critic loves The Most Dangerous Writing App

Your inner critic isn’t there to annoy you just for the heck of it; it actually has a function. The goal of your inner critic is to help you prevent making mistakes. A horrible quality while doing creative work, but essential for proper editing.

So I moved my work from TMDWA to Medium and told my inner critic to have a field day with it. They spotted every typo, run-on sentence, inconsistencies in my reasoning, and hyperbole.

Slowly but surely, my inner critic molded the lump of clay from TMDWA into a proper article. My inner critic and I could edit ruthlessly, now that all of the words were out of my system.

Now, every time my inner critic becomes too intrusive, I switch from Medium to TMDWA and write the core of my stories without the constant nagging of my inner critic.

It’s not really that dangerous though

Are you hesitant to use it because you’re afraid you’ll write something brilliant and lose it forever? Don’t worry; I quickly discovered TMDWA offers a free download of a Word document with the text that has just disappeared.

After your text disappears, you see this screen:

Screenshot by author edited in Canva

When you click on Export DOC, you get a Word document with the entire text that has “disappeared.”

So it’s maybe not the Most Dangerous Writing App in the world, but it is definitely really good at shutting up your inner critic.