Posts tagged awkward moments

1.  Typos.  How could there be typos?  I’m not some eight-year-old on an internet forum!  I know how to spell these words, so why did I get them wrong?

2. Copied phrases.  Oh, gosh, did I really put that?  That’s exactly the same as in that book I read a while ago!  How did I not notice when I was writing it?

3. Forgetfulness.  He’s still injured, so why is he walking around normally?  How did I ever forget something as big as his injury? asdfghjkl

4.  Too few words.  Wow.  This sure doesn’t paint a picture in the readers’ heads.  It’s like I never heard the words “show, don’t tell.”

5.  Too many words.  Really, past me?  Were you trying to cram as many unnecessary words in as possible?  Your prose is the color of Barney the Dinosaur.

6. Grammatical errors.  This is inexcusable.  I know grammar.  I speak correctly.  That should carry over to my writing!  Why didn’t it?

7. Words that mean the wrong thing.  Did I not have a brain in my head when I wrote this?  The dictionary is as close as a Google search.  I shouldn’t have even used those words if I wasn’t sure.  Ugh.

8.  Offensiveness.  I didn’t mean for that sentence to put down Asians, I swear!  How could I have ever worded it that way?  I’m so stupid!

9. Self-insertion.  Okay, nobody is going to be able to sympathize with that.  That is something that only I do, and it adds nothing to the story or the characters.  I need to take that out.

10. General crappiness.  The whole thing looks like I threw up on the keyboard.  How will this ever become good?

The follower of the day is anautumndragonfly.

1.  That moment when you have a large, complex idea that you want to tell everybody, but you know nobody is going to want to listen to you ramble about your story for two hours.

2.  That moment when as you actually type the words, you realize that the story isn’t matching up with your awesome outline.

3.  That moment when your brain has a conversation with itself, half of the neurons taking the side of “the fan” and the other half taking the side of “the hater.”

4.  That moment when you know EXACTLY what is going to happen only two or three paragraphs in the future, and you know EXACTLY how it’s going to get there, and since you know so much about it, you really shouldn’t be having writer’s block, but you just can’t find the right words.

5.  That moment when you think about a supposedly minor character enough that you eventually say, “Aw, screw it.  I’ll just have two protagonists.”

6.  That moment when you read somebody’s writing online, see how horrible it is, and think about how the author will hate it when they look back on it in a couple of months.  This moment also includes thinking nervously about your own writing.

7.  That moment when you realize how ridiculous your plot could sound if you used certain phrasing.

8.  That moment when you have to wake up in the morning at a reasonable hour after staying up half the night writing.  This is the least fun of all of the moments.

9.  That moment when you hear a snippet of conversation and just know it’s going to make it into your writing.  This moment also includes wondering what the people you heard are going to think if they ever read your work.

10.  That moment when you bless the computer for having things like a backspace button and a readable font that regular pieces of paper don’t have but curse the computer for having things like Tumblr that are practically designed to keep you from writing.

The follower of the day is opheliasalt.