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Frustrated Filling

[(Anonymous)]

My English skills have gotten terrible lately (1 part cognitive fog, 2 parts not writing anything but memes)
I have 15+ prompts in Notepad that have 2-3 finished sentences and a paragraph more of key ideas in bizarre, unreadable gibberish. It takes a frustratingly long time to wrangle ideas into legible, semi-grammatical English (and fogging up quickly doesn't help.)

Idk, general writing whining thread?

Re: Frustrated Filling

[(Anonymous)]

I think I'm being careful about my vocab and the minute I post something to the meme so it can't be fixed I'll realize I used a distinctive word distinctively in three distinct paragraphs one after another, blah. :P

(man, that sucks: sending best wishes for the fog to clear, as it were)

Re: Frustrated Filling

[(Anonymous)]

Oh god that sounds like me. I have a massive note on my phone that's just link after link and then loads of incomprehensible nonsense next to each one and I look at them like....wut.

And the other day I posted a fic to ao3 like yup that's ready and then spent like 40 minutes editing it then saving it then finding something else and editing it again and then finding something else...people reading it could probably see it changing as they read ahahahaha help

Re: Frustrated Filling

[(Anonymous)]

It's a new art form, Shifting Literature. Like how the poem Howl is different with each performance lol

Best advice I've gotten on editing is to read your piece out loud. Your ear will pick up things your eyes didn't (not to mention the errors that you stop noticing when you've been staring at the same page for hours)

Hopefully that'll help someone at least a little

Re: Frustrated Filling

[(Anonymous)]

My best editing tip is to read your piece backwards, one sentence at a time. It won't help much for flow, but it's invaluable for picking up typos and re-use of words. The theory is that after writing, reading and editing a piece, you know how it goes and your expectations of what's there get in the way what's actually written on the page. It works pretty well for me most of the time, but YMMV of course.