The first draft is allowed to be dreadful

You cannot edit a void. You can edit a mess. Lower the status of the current page until it is merely clay, then make more clay. The inner critic may sit in the waiting room with a magazine. It will get its turn — later.

Dreadful is a technical term here, not an insult. A first draft that is trying to be final will move at the speed of anxiety. Every sentence has to justify itself before the next one is allowed to exist. That is how a morning becomes a paragraph. Give the draft permission to be provisional and the paragraph becomes a scene.

The critic is not the enemy. The critic is early. It is the same faculty that will later notice the repeated word, the slack middle, the joke that punches down. Invite it back when there is something to chew. If you let it edit the sentence while you are still finding the scene, you will protect a page that does not yet deserve protection.

A practical trick: type the words 'this is a bad version' at the top and mean them. Or write the scene in the wrong tense, the wrong person, as a letter, as a list. Lowering the form lowers the stakes. You can always translate a living mess into a chapter. You cannot translate a silence.

When the clay exists, the work changes character. You are no longer asking whether you are a writer. You are asking whether this sentence is the one. That second question is answerable. The first one never is.