The mental aspect of the physical act of writing is giving me some trouble recently. In other words - I think that I'm thinking too much as I'm writing and it seems to be interfering with my concentration and flow.
The thing is, I have a basic idea of what I want to write and how I'm going to accomplish that, but I keep getting extra input from my mind. It keeps telling me that what I'm writing is u, v and w and that I ought to be writing x, y and z (I'll not trouble your head with the details).
It's as if I have another person in the room (I don't - this isn't a metaphor) looking over my shoulder, reading my prose and offering suggestions all the time.
So my question is: how do I separate myself from my thinking about the story long enough for it to flow from me and yet still remain close enough to the story to retain a modicum of control over its direction?
Or, put more simply: how do I turn off my inner critic whilst writing?
Research: I found a nice question here: How to organize your ideas, how to keep reasonable when writing, which addresses my problem somewhat, but the answers focus on short-term tactics to cope with new ideas coming up about the current piece of work whereas what I want is a strategy to radically change the way my mind is working whilst writing.
And finally, this: I watched Elizabeth Gilbert give a Ted Talk called Your elusive creative genius a while back where she talks about 'genius' being a:
... magical divine entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist's studio, kind of like Dobby the house elf, and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work ...
It seems to me that my 'genius' has slipped into overdrive (or gone bonkers).