A writer's OCD
I admit, I have a mild case of OCD - Obsessive-Compulsive-Disorder. And it affects my writing, and not in a good way. I think it started in childhood, at least according to my father. Apparently while spoon feeding me, a tiny drop of baby food splatted on my t-shirt. I proceeded to cry and scream until my father replaced the soiled shirt with a fresh clean one. Then all was right in the world.
Fast-forward a few decades...ahem, and I still can't stand to be stained. That's one reason while you'll never see a tattoo on this boy. I would scrub my arm with sandpaper until my skin was once again unblemished or reduced to bloody ribbons. So needless to say my teenage years of pimples and blackheads were horrible in so many ways.
But what does all this have to do with writing?
Well, the OCD has mutated. No longer is the disorder restricted to stains and blemishes. Now it's blossomed into a whole new enigmatic disorder that has me staring at the page margins in dismay if they're not perfectly aligned. You see, I use to write with the alignment to the left. But do you see how choppy it looks (observe the paragraphs above)?
Then I discovered the Justify option, where all the words are aligned both on the right and the left. Ahhh, blissful uniformity. No stains. No blemishes. All is right in the world.
Wrong!
That's when I noticed that the spaces between words varied. Some sentences with extraordinarily humongous words would have huge gaps in them even though they were justified. You can see my point in the sentence above.
And I can't help but notice this craziness as I'm writing. I ought to be reserving my creativity for the story and the characters and the dialogue. Instead I find myself changing words around just so the sentences look aesthetically perfect. What a nightmare, right? I'm basically sacrificing good, clean writing for the sake of visual uniformity. When I should be paying attention to rhythm and timing and truth in storytelling.
So, I deal with my writing OCD daily. I still find myself substituting a word for another just so the sentence looks even. Bad, Grant! But I can't help it. And then I convince myself that I really did choose a better word. Or the reason why the sentence is perfectly aligned is because the story is told exactly the way the cosmos planned it.
And Grant said on the seventh word change the story was good.
And it was so.
Till next time, keep reading and writing!
Fast-forward a few decades...ahem, and I still can't stand to be stained. That's one reason while you'll never see a tattoo on this boy. I would scrub my arm with sandpaper until my skin was once again unblemished or reduced to bloody ribbons. So needless to say my teenage years of pimples and blackheads were horrible in so many ways.
But what does all this have to do with writing?
Well, the OCD has mutated. No longer is the disorder restricted to stains and blemishes. Now it's blossomed into a whole new enigmatic disorder that has me staring at the page margins in dismay if they're not perfectly aligned. You see, I use to write with the alignment to the left. But do you see how choppy it looks (observe the paragraphs above)?
Then I discovered the Justify option, where all the words are aligned both on the right and the left. Ahhh, blissful uniformity. No stains. No blemishes. All is right in the world.
Wrong!
That's when I noticed that the spaces between words varied. Some sentences with extraordinarily humongous words would have huge gaps in them even though they were justified. You can see my point in the sentence above.
And I can't help but notice this craziness as I'm writing. I ought to be reserving my creativity for the story and the characters and the dialogue. Instead I find myself changing words around just so the sentences look aesthetically perfect. What a nightmare, right? I'm basically sacrificing good, clean writing for the sake of visual uniformity. When I should be paying attention to rhythm and timing and truth in storytelling.
So, I deal with my writing OCD daily. I still find myself substituting a word for another just so the sentence looks even. Bad, Grant! But I can't help it. And then I convince myself that I really did choose a better word. Or the reason why the sentence is perfectly aligned is because the story is told exactly the way the cosmos planned it.
And Grant said on the seventh word change the story was good.
And it was so.
Till next time, keep reading and writing!
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