Critical Voice Versus Creative Voice — Avoid the Typical Novelist’s Struggle

How to access the biggest part of your brain to do your best writing ever

A few weeks ago I wrote a piece about draft-free novel-writing. I learned this method from a well-seasoned (200+ books) author named Dean Wesley Smith.

The post polarized its readers. Either folks loved it or didn’t. The idea of writing a full novel, with no outline, in a single take, with no re-writes terrified a lot of people. I even got some nasty mail… how dare I challenge the status quoa.

I get it.

The idea of writing into the dark seems crazy. It’s enough for stiff-lipped authors to lose their minds at the thought of going rogue. This method isn’t for everyone.

…but it might be for you.

Last night I re-read Smith’s book, Writing into the Dark. There was a piece I missed the first time around. I’m already a convert to his method, but this small piece made me a double-convert.

Here’s the original post if you want to get up to speed:

Critical Voice Versus Creative Voice

In the book Smith has a small chapter about the two voices. You can also substitute conscious mind versus sub-conscious mind. Our conscious mind — the reasoning and direction-following part of our brains is a tiny sliver compared to the powerhouse of the sub-conscious.

Our conscious mind can only focus on one task at a time, while the subconscious can work on an indefinite list.

The subconscious mind is our creative voice. We only get to access this part of our writing brains when we’re in the right mindset. Big, detailed outlines take us out of our creative voice.

We know what will happen before we write it. We know how the gun will go off in act two. We know all the characters in advance, what they’ll wear, the conflicts they’ll face, and how the story will end.

Smith argues that art can only be created with the creative voice.

When we write into the dark we don’t know what will happen in 20 pages, so neither will the reader. Detailed outlines take us away from the subconscious writing, and straight to the critical voice.

The critical voice is the part of our brain that dissects every story. We read books by famous writers, using this critical voice, and think ‘I can do better than that,’ versus reading the story through a reader’s eyes.

We write off our outlines and stay in that conscious, analytical mind. Occasionally, the end-result is a predictable book. The reader sees what will happen before it happens, because YOU knew what would happen before it happens.

There is no single set of writing rules

Writing into the dark is an option. It’s not the only option. There are thousands of novelists that outline and thousands who don’t. Many of the successful novelists I know use the outline as an idea spark, but the end book looks little like the one they planned in the outline.

This is the creative voice talking.

I use a framework for my stories. This helps keep me on track. I’ve tried outlining and it didn’t go well for me. But there is no single set of writing rules.

Even authors, some of the most-polite and meaningful people I know, love to debate how writing should and shouldn’t be done. I’ve got my opinions. I give them for selfish reasons. I want more people to write the way I like to read.

But there’s one thing I hope we can all agree on — the creative voice is the voice of story.

Our readers want to be surprised as much as we do. If we know everything that goes into a book from start to finish, we’re little more than typists. Right now, I don’t use Smith’s method exactly. I like to know how my stories will end. I write the end first.

But 99% of the middle is a mystery to me until I start.

End-first is total blasphemy to many writers. That’s cool too. There’s no one way to write a book. I find if I don’t know where I’m going, my creative voice will take a turn no GPS can get me back from.

It’s time to get creative

When we write into the dark we’ve got no choice but document the movie as it unfolds. We sit in the chair, press ‘play,’ and write what we see. We write the next sentence. Then the next.

When we, as authors, have no idea what happens next, our readers won’t either.

This single-draft method isn’t really one draft anyway. Every 500–700 word you loop back to what you just wrote, editing-through in real-time. If you get stuck, you loop back again. The creative voice will help carry us through.

By the time we reach the end of the book, every scene has been re-written multiple times. But the re-writes happen as they’re written. We don’t have to slog through an entire manuscript from nose to to toes.

I despise the formal editing process, so this method works well for me.

Some authors love editing more than writing, so one-draft-done may give them an ulcer. Point is, no one’s gonna take your fun away. I think we write our best stories when we can eliminate the parts of the process we hate.

If you love outlining, maybe try a looser approach, with unanswered questions in each scene.

The more we can operate in our creative voice the more we’ll benefit our readers. Better stories will come out of us. You know, the parts you come back to and don’t remember reading — that’s your creative voice doing the work.

We become passive observers of the story.

We learn how the story unfolds as a reader — not as a critical writer.

We put on our critical hats when we loop back through the part we just wrote. The critical voice helps make out craft better. The critical voice tells us we need to comb back through the story and set-up the new conflict our creative voice invented in chapter 30.

Maybe this method won’t work for you. It’s used by more writers than you’d think, so if you’re having trouble with your current method, it’s worth a try.

Our creative voice will take the story more places than your critical voice can fathom. Our work will be less-predictable. The writing process will be exciting and more-productive.

We’ll write less-sloppy (no more permission to write shitty first drafts) because we know the end means the end.

We need you be excited about writing. We need you to write stories that take us places we’d never know. We need your creative voice.

We’re waiting for you.