If you’re like me and thousands of other writers out there, the thought of a red squiggly line makes you see double.

Awkward sentences cause queasiness and you can’t even bear the thought of having one word out of place.

Messed up tenses, wrongly named characters? Forget it. Not in your manuscript.

The result? Time lost to antagonizing over word choice and structure. If something sounds weird, I stare at it for a minute before inevitably editing.

It’s really quite difficult to make much progress on an 80,000+ word novel when it takes you an hour to write 500 words.

I’ve read lots and lots of posts instructing writers to “turn off your editing brain”. They suggest software and websites that don’t let you backspace or hide the words you write as soon as you write them.

I was never much sold on the idea of not being able to change things as you write them–knowing that I wrote something riddled with mistakes leaves something close to self-despair growing in my bones.

But at the same time, I knew that I would never finish my book if I kept pausing every time I made a mistake.

So, one day after a particularly non-productive writing session, I antagonized over my dilemma. Should I just resign to the fact that I was going to take ages to finish my novel? Or could I find a way to adapt?

That’s when I had an idea. I wouldn’t call it a strike of brilliance by any means, but I knew I had to give it a try.

I had an extra keyboard lying around, a wireless freebie I picked up from my job. It doesn’t get much use–it’s just as convenient to type from my laptop keyboard, if not easier–but it’s not clunky and the keys aren’t clacky.

So I plugged in the keyboard, pulled up my document, and then moved my laptop so I could just see the side of my screen.

Away I typed.

Immediately, I found an increased tenacity and ferocity in my speed. I wasn’t distracted by red lines telling me I misspelled a word or misplaced punctuation. I could type and type and type without cause to stop. And, if I wanted to go back a sentence or two because I forgot what I was going to say, I could just lean forward and double check my screen.

After an hour, I found that I had written nearly 1300 words–nearly double what I was doing before! And I found that the mistakes I made didn’t nearly bother me as much after the fact as they would have during.

I confess, I went back to what I had written and cleaned up misspellings and anything else jumping out at me during a quick skim read. But this took less than five minutes and was more for my sanity than anything else.

I plan to do most, if not all, of my writing sessions like this. The excitement of getting all my words onto the page far beat out the excitement of a well-written sentence.

After all, there’s time for that later!

What do you do to get past your editing brain? Let me know below.