Writing & Editing - Getting Over Your Separation Anxiety

 "Don't write and edit at the same time!"

"First write. Then edit."

We know the mantra. Seems like good advice. It is good advice. However, some of this insistence on separating writing and editing is held over from an era when it was very time-consuming to switch from one to the other. People wrote on paper or typed on typewriters. Editing meant that you might have to rewrite or retype an entire section, scene, or chapter because you needed to make just a few minor changes.

That's no longer the case with all of our super whizzbang writing software. Many of our edits fall within the creative process anyhow. Your first draft doesn't have to look like some stream-of-consciousness Finnegan's Wake word salad. Why forget an important and essential change because you're in composition mode and not editing mode? Maybe it's a one-minute fix now but an hour fix later because you have to decipher the incomprehensible Finnegan's Notes you left for yourself.
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Also, I don't think you need to completely finish your story before you do some editing. There might be times when your mind is not in the creative/composition mode. Maybe that well is temporarily dry. So switch to editing mode. So what if you do that for an hour. Or a day. Or a weekend. ESPECIALLY if you weren't going to write, anyhow.

What you don't want to do is continually break your creative process with, what are at the time, unnecessary edits. Spell checks and grammar edits can certainly wait until the end. You do not need to till that same soil over and over again. However, it you spot a simple plot hole, fix it. Otherwise, you might forget it. Or by not fixing it, you might drive yourself insane. If you need to go pack and "plant" something earlier in the story so there can be a "payoff" with what you're writing now, do it! Do it before that genius disappears. That's all part of the creative process, and you're still pushing forward.

IN GENERAL, push out that first draft. Be like a jockey with a whip, driving forward. However, some editing along the way is okay, especially if it keeps you from going insane (so quickly).