The advice to murder your darlings is perhaps one of the more useful pieces of advice I’ve received about writing, reminding the writer that just being the best piece of writing you’ve ever done doesn’t qualify anything for preservation if it’s not serving a useful purpose. However, during this week I’ve found that the advice from a creative writing tutor to stop listening to my Inner Editor has been far more useful.

Everyone has an Inner Editor. He, or she (or, indeed, it) is the ultimate pushy parent. Unlike your Inner Child, he (for the sake of argument, it’s gender-stabilised now) is very well-read, knows all about grammar and style and spelling, and has rules about all of them. He’s determined that every sentence you write must be an exact masterpiece, every preposition perfectly in place and every phrase intelligently rounded…