# Woes of the wordsmith



## Xipoid (Dec 1, 2007)

You need not actually be a wordsmith to reply (goodness knows I'm not), but is there something about your literary expeditions that irritates you?


I can attest that my own creations have a tendency towards limited vocabularies. Something happens while I write that seemingly erases my word bank. I'll think of a particular connotation, and then I'll hear the beginning of the word in my mind ("scru-" for example) when the voice suddenly seizes up as though ingesting nerve gas. Of course, I'm stuck with that single syllable trying to decipher just what my muse was attempting to say (which usually pans out to a confusing and haphazard word search inevitably finding only synonyms).

In addition, my typing abilities seem to be suffering greatly. (I fear I'm experiencing a state of mental decay)


What about you?


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## Rilvor (Dec 1, 2007)

Occasionally I know what I want, and I know how it starts, but I just can't grasp the word, but I dunno..I don't think I can help you here :|


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## M. LeRenard (Dec 1, 2007)

A couple of times this has happened to me... occasionally I'll be going along, writing a lot and feeling good, and then suddenly I remember some little detail from way back when that goes completely against my current plans for the story, and I lose all ability to come up with anything new until the problem is resolved.  I know I shouldn't care, because it's a first draft, but I just can't take it when I KNOW there's something wrong, so I end up typing about half a sentence a day until I figure out how to fix it.


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## ShÃ nwÃ ng (Dec 1, 2007)

I tend to lose what exactly I had been writing about at some point through the work. My writing for the moment is highly disorganized and I'm still trying to ping out what details are important and which ones aren't.


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## TheGru (Dec 1, 2007)

My largest woe is I can't always find the inspiration for my works, nor get them to turn out 100% as to word choice. Also my muse is a rather chaotic beast, that seems to run on more than one story and it's hard to sort it all out.


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## Le_DÃ©mon_Sans_Visage (Dec 1, 2007)

Spelling is a big one. I spell like a five year old with dyslexia, but I tend to like Lovecraftian ten dollar words, so I'll get about halfway through a word and just start randomly banging on the keyboard and hoping the spellchecker can guess what I mean. 

Also, for some reason I have to be in a very specific mood to write. I can't explain it or describe it, but if I'm not in gear, then I am terribly distracted and can't stop flipping through books or thinking about how I'd love to go downstairs and get a carrot or something equally petty and unproductive.


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## gust (Dec 2, 2007)

For me it's mainly a grammer issue.  I tend to reflexively hit the comma key about 5 times a sentance, then i go back to read it and see commas all over the place to delete.  
That and I always have the perfect word on the tip of my tounge but can't think of what it is for the life of me.


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## Kindar (Dec 2, 2007)

Bowtoid_Obelisk said:
			
		

> I tend to lose what exactly I had been writing about at some point through the work. My writing for the moment is highly disorganized and I'm still trying to ping out what details are important and which ones aren't.



Loosing trak of what I was writing about is why I now tend write down a plan for where my story is going, the amount of details vary form one story to the next, but all the strong points will be in there, and I'll add details as I think of them as the story gets writen.

I also to devide my writing in "scenes"  to stop me from getting over whelmed by the enormity of what I'm writing


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## Poetigress (Dec 2, 2007)

Not finishing what I start.  I'm good at beginnings, but I'm still learning how to push through when the going gets rougher in the middle, so I can get to whatever profound ending I've dreamed up.  >^_^<


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## Kemmy (Dec 2, 2007)

:'
Exact opposite problem as Poetigress, bad at beginnings, but I get multiple endings to my stories, and have trouble trying to see which one I want to use.

And when I'm writing I'll have some random Idea for a scene later on that I'll stop working on what I was doing and move on to the new scene then forget what I was doing before.


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## lobosabio (Dec 5, 2007)

Oh god, I hate when that happens.  I have a habit of going into autopilot when I'm writing.  I'll be going along and suddenly my subconscious will pull out a word I don't normally use.  If I can get the spelling correct with a minute or two, I'm fine, but if not, it's like a car hitting a brick wall.  I have to stop and try alternate spellings, hoping the Spell Checker will recognize what I'm trying to spell.  If that doesn't work, I'll have to go and retrieve the dictionary to attempt to look it up.  This usually kills off large amounts of my precious time and it rather difficult to recover from.  

I also have had, for most of my life, trouble finishing things.  When I get to the end of the story, I'm usually thinking "OK, where can I end this?  Where can I end this?"  It can result in some very sloppy finishes.


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## Rilvor (Dec 5, 2007)

I'm actually rather strange with my poems..if I try to force myself to make one, it takes forever to grab the right words, and can take up to 30 minutes to make a few lines..but under my normal working conditions (being, whenever everything in my head just seems to fall into place like a whole level of Tetris matching up, when the lock on my inspiration is broken) I can tear out the words pretty quick, just right out of thin air...my best poems were made in 5 minutes.


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## Wolfblade (Dec 6, 2007)

Run-on sentences.

My Grammar teacher had no end of frustration with my excessive, yet (usually) technically still grammatically correct, run-on sentences.

Also I have a very parenthetical way of thinking that makes its way into what I write much to the confusion of many.

I've gotten a lot better than how I used to be though. XD


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## Le_DÃ©mon_Sans_Visage (Dec 6, 2007)

Wolfblade said:
			
		

> Run-on sentences.



Oh yeah, ditto. In this thing I wrote recently, one sentence was a hundred and one words long. Yikes.


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## twilightiger (Dec 27, 2007)

Alliteration, allusion and rythm are the worst for me. Having a large vocabulary doesn't help much if no one knows what your words even mean. But if I sacrificed precision for clarity most of what I write would fall flat. So it's a bit of a trade off.


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## Rhainor (Dec 27, 2007)

Finishing what I start.  Last time I wrote a story and actually managed to finish it was back in middle school, as a book report/project...thing (either rewrite the last chapter of the book, or write an additional chapter).

Not trying to brag here, but I'm a fairly good writer...when I can actually get through all the steps (get the story down, proofread, edit, proofread, tweak, proofread, edit, proofread, etc.).  I found that project story again a few years later, read it, and went "holy crap, did I actually write this when I was 13?"  When I try to write for fun, though, I just. Can't. Finish.

The ADD probably doesn't help with that...


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