Thursday, June 16, 2011

Derailed again...

Much has been written about the writer's life. There are articles on writer's block. And posts about balancing home and writing. If you need to know about royalties, contracts, editing, or just about any old thing, there's something out there.

But...there aren't very many discussions about the derailed thought syndrome. Maybe I'm the only one that suffers from this debilitating condition. It's terrible. I'll be typing along at my usual speed demon fifteen words a minute when bamm! The thought is gone.

Sometimes it's only a word. Other times it's a complete sentence or even a stretch of dialogue. Oh, woe is me!

It's bad enough when the derailment is...sigh. Time for a commercial while I find my thought.

Ah...there it is. Bad enough when I derail on my own. When the house hunk causes it, though, that is worse. You know--the odd little visits the family makes just when you're in the middle of the most difficult paragraph you've worked on all day? And they want to know something incredibly important like, "Whatcha doin'?"

And your train of thought shoots off the tracks, down the embankment into the woods. :-(

I find that I lose words now. Yep. I'll be typing along, happy as a frog in a pond, and suddenly the next word is just gone. Nothing I do seems to work. Eventually, I put big question marks in BOLD and RED in my document and move on.

The next time I read through, what do you know? The darned word pops up just like it hasn't been hiding in the first place. *&^#^*!

The worst is when you know the word is right there, hanging out at the edge of your brain and it refuses, absolutely refuses to coming out of hiding. I once waited for two weeks before the darned word showed up. Abstract words are the most difficult because you can't explain them clearly enough for your critique partners to guess what you're going for.

How about you? Do you get derailed? And if so, what do you do about it?

anny

4 comments:

  1. I couldn't help laughing as I read this. Most of the time when this happens, it's either my husband or son saying something that could have waited until I got the sentence all typed up.

    I usually tell myself that's what editing is for and hope I come up with an even better word/phrase/sentence to fill in for the one that got aborted.

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  2. Oh I hate when that happens. It's usually just one word for me, but I never thought about moving on. LOL I normally just stick something in and hope that when I go back the RIGHT word will pop in my head. Now I'll just skip it and stop frustrating the heck out of myself! :)

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  3. I write in weird arsed shorthand, only I can understand, the whole story very quickly with all the dialogue and then I go through and write it properly therfore I never get derailed...but that's me...I'm odd

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  4. You're writing my life, girlfriend.

    'Happy as a frog in a pond'. Heh heh

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