let the editing begin!!

It is perfectly okay to write garbage - as long as you edit brilliantly.
- C. J. Cherryh

Filling a blank page with words is hard, but changing words that are already there is even more difficult, not to mention having to delete words because of space constraints (i.e. writing an article about a fascinating subject with a word count that can't possibly accommodate all I have to say about aforementioned fascinating subject... without every single word that was there to begin with it, it might actually be reduced to something less than fascinating).
Then there are novels and stories and plot lines with muddy twists and gaping holes, and suddenly you find yourself being poked incessantly by that inner editor that you, the writer, for once in your life had been holding back for just enough time so that you could get something - anything - on paper.

So you did, and now here you sit, staring at a large quantity of words that at some odd hour of the night once seemed to all make sense. Half drunk on sleep, half invigorated with a burst of creative adrenaline, you did something all writers must learn to do at some point if they ever hope to be productive - you locked away the perfectionist, the cautious artist, the know-it-all procrastinator, the pouty second-guesser, the biting critic, the voice that won't shut up, the random-thought stifler, the self-proclaimed all-important, all-knowing editor.

Yes, you managed to do the near impossible, and you smile and pat yourself on the back, knowing that you let your creativity flow and your imagination run wherever it wanted to go, as long as there was a string, as flimsy as it may have been, tying it all together.

And then you begin to read, now alert and ready to finalize what is sure to be no less than genius... but of course, it is far from it.

You realize that names of rather important characters changed mid-story, and you are now at a loss to make a decision, as both sets of names have their merits.

Somewhere between Chapters 1 and 2, your protagonist was cured of his asthma and abandoned his inhaler, leaving him to spend much of his time sprinting long distances to get to each remaining chapter. Perhaps readers won't notice...

As you're reading, you have to remind yourself that there is only one of you, not eight, as the various styles of writing that come and go throughout the novel would lead other, more unsuspecting readers than yourself to believe.

You start to wonder if you subconsciously favor only ten out of the gazillion words in the English dictionary because, as you notice with a frown, they seem to be every other word in your story.

Yes, all these things and more become very apparent all too quickly after a first read-through.

So what's a writer to do? Well, bring back that pesky inner editor, of course, who will no doubt be mumbling, "I told you so," through the whole editing/revising/rewriting (and very long) ordeal.

But as a writer, who now has 100+ pages of text to call your own, you know it was worth it. Your novel may not be perfect, and a good portion of it might sound downright ridiculous, but it's only Round 1, with many, many nights to go before you sleep.