What’s That Word Again?
e’ve all been there, we’re on a roll, writing really great stuff that we actually love, our characters are witty and everything is perfect until… shit. Wait, what’s that word… you know the one? The one that means that thing but it’s… ackkk!
Nothing will kill a good writing session faster than forgetting a word that you know you know but for some reason just won’t come to mind. Worse still you can barely remember what it actually means, only what you’re trying to say. It’s because of this phenomenon that happens, frankly far too frequently for my liking, although if it happens once a year that’s too frequent to me, I’ve researched all kinds of reverse dictionaries, and still I’ve had little to no success. Eventually the word will come to me, or I will try and put an alternate word in it’s place with a note to myself to come back to that because that’s not the word I wanted to use there, but there really is no worse feeling for a writer than the complete halting because you’re trying to figure out what that word was, and I’m probably not alone when I say that you almost can’t get back to writing because even if you want to stop thinking about it, you can’t help but come back to it over and over. WHAT WAS THAT GOD FORSAKEN WORD?! I swore i just used it a few weeks ago, but of course that was in real life, not in your book so naturally even if you did use it, there’s no proof of it’s existence.
Even better is when you finally remember the word in question and you look it up in the dictionary just to be sure and you realize, it didn’t actually mean what you thought it did, so it’s not the right word anyway, so you’re right back at square one. Or is it just me that this happens to? If anyone else has this problem how the hell do you fix it? Do you just ignore it and move on or does it fester in your brain all day until you manage to figure it out?
