One bit of advice that gets thrown out often to writers who are trying to do the “write a novel in a month” thing is to turn off your internal editor. There’s some sound logic behind that advice, if your internal editor is preventing you from getting words into a draft.

But not everybody’s internal editor does that.

For some people, writing is a back-and-forth dance of putting words down, moving them around, adding little touches, and removing bits of fluff until you have a lovely paragraph, and then moving on to the next one.

Their internal editor is more like an interior decorator who just wants the freedom to feng shui this particular room a little before moving on to dump everything from the U-Haul that is your brain into the next one.

The problem isn’t editing-as-you-go. It’s when editing is keeping you from, you know, actually going anywhere. If you’ve written and re-written your first chapter, or first page, or god help you, your first paragraph a dozen times, then it’s probably a good idea to put your internal editor in time out (if you can – some people genuinely can’t).

But if you’re not blazing through your draft at lightspeed because it turns out you’re enjoying the process of making the sentences and paragraphs better as much as you enjoy getting the story out of your head and in print… that’s not a problem.

Believe me, enjoying the process of editing will make getting to a finished novel you feel okay about showing people a MUCH EASIER TASK. This is a feature, not a bug, dude.

So edit away, if that makes your novel writing month more enjoyable. But also: open your draft and write.