On the tip of my tongue.

This is something everyone has experienced and it is soooo frustrating.

You may find yourself in the middle of a conversation, an argument, maybe a debate, and you seem to forget how to English. You had the perfect line just waiting to come out and it evaporates like the morning mists, leaving nothing but silence and a sort of gap in your thoughts while you try to grasp it.

This, unfortunately, happens in writing, and is the cause of some of my more poetic sentences.

I have nothing against beautiful prose, but, as most of you have noticed, I’m more direct and functional than beautiful. Clarity has a purity all its own that raises it up. And the perfect word is, well, for lack of a better word, perfect.

Every author does, or should seek the perfect word, the perfect line, the perfect story, but we are just as human as the rest of you. Nothing comes easily, and some days it’s just not worth getting up. Editing can help. So can multiple read throughs. But they are stop gap measures, for once the moment has past all you are left with is the knowledge that a better word should go there.

In conversation you can fumble and it will be forgotten. In text, it is there forever.

How do you cope when your brain goes nope?