Fiction is Harder than Non

It's been eight days between posts, but I have an excuse. I've been working on a fiction piece, a story I plan to tell a particular group. The trouble is I am unable to simply let go of the audience and just write. The voice I use to write is overtaken by the critic's voice that continually asks what will the audience think of that. or is this a story you can tell them?

Maybe the 2 voices use the same channel and it's like my DVR, if I'm recording on more than one channel, the TV doesn't want to let me view a show without cancelling one of the recordings. While both voices are useful, I need to suspend the critic for intervals. But there are times I know I need both voices at once. for instance, when I listen to the critic's voice I still need the writing voice for the rewrites that take place on the fly to satisfy the critic.

I know, I know, I hear you saying it--he's no longer of sound mind--hearing voices. But still....

What I want to do is write the story, perhaps several stories in one, and then edit it (if I need to do that) for a particular audience. Saying it isn't doing it, though. Each time I sit down to write I go off on a tangent looking for more information, hoping solid sources might discourage the critic. I tell myself--if I just had a simpler explanation for this, or a clearer analogy for that, or an underlying theory that no one would question, I wouldn't hear the constant carping from the critic.

Why doesn't this happen when the subject is non-fiction? When it's non-fiction, the critic is drowned out, or at least subdued. He can disagree with me and I am unperturbed. In fact, when the critic asks a question, arguments spring forth from my head that protect me from the critic's carping, even providing more material for whatever I am writing about. So why doesn't it work for this piece of fiction?

Part of the problem is the premise of this particular story is hard for the critic to accept. But it is fiction, I say, so fantastic or not, it's allowed. I should be free to bend rules/reality however I want. It just makes me want to go back to non-fiction, where we bend reality and pretend we aren't. We call it "opinion."