Melissa Barker-Simpson

Obsessive much? #AtoZChallenge – Peculiar ‘Pen fellows’ – Quirks only a writer can understand

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OObsessive much? 

For writers, the editing process is tricky business. Once the first draft is finished, the revision stage begins and by the time it’s ready for another set of eyes, our own are crossed! 

We go through it so many times we start to obsess over the little things, like comma placement. The more we deliberate, the more we doubt ourselves and then we start to pepper them everywhere. Well, okay, not really, but I do have a tendency to get comma happy! 

It’s not surprising, either. As writers we have a tendency to over-analyse. I can’t send an email without checking it a dozen times, and don’t even get me started on text messages. I could write an essay on text speak and the use of acronyms, or worse abbreviations. 

Thanks for stopping by

Mel

6 responses to “Obsessive much? #AtoZChallenge – Peculiar ‘Pen fellows’ – Quirks only a writer can understand”

  1. Jacqui Murray Avatar
    Jacqui Murray

    I’m with you. I can’t re-read with making a change. It’s never right and I think it has more to do with my state of mind than the state of my writing. Sigh.

    Reply
    1. mbarkersimpson Avatar
      mbarkersimpson

      Yes, I think that applies to many writers…the more we read something, the more we find to fix! Even if that’s a slight change in sentence structure, one that it could be argued at a later date doesn’t improve the text, we’d still want to change it in the ‘here and now!’

      Reply
  2. jrose88 Avatar
    jrose88

    At some point in college, as part of a fandom thing, I did silly fake reports on Twitter and prided myself into never using abbreviations (except for ampersands, who doesn’t like ampersands) to avoid going over the 140 character limit. Sometimes I broke statements up into two seperate tweets, connected with dot dot dots, but for the most part I challenged myself to cram it all in there as grammatically correctly as possible. It was fun.

    Reply
    1. mbarkersimpson Avatar
      mbarkersimpson

      That does sound like fun…I love a good writing challenge. And ampersands are cool, though I do still occasionally channel Yul Brynner in the King and I and throw around a few et ceteras!

      Reply
  3. jazzfeathers Avatar
    jazzfeathers

    LOL! Honestly, I cant’ say that’s me. My social media are full of typoes and miswritten sentences because often I don’t even reread them.
    With my writing, I kind of follow a schedul. I know I need to revise at least three times before my writing becomes kind of inteligible to anyone else by me. I’d only show that stage to a few trusted friend. After those friends have read the story and critique it, I knwo I need at least another revision before I can start thinkign to beta readers. From there, it’s any number of revision before I’m (reasonably) happy with it.
    I’d say that a schedule does help to be less obsessive.

    Reply
    1. mbarkersimpson Avatar
      mbarkersimpson

      Sound advice…scheduling (or lack there of) has always been my weakness. I’ll work on it and reduce the stress! Thanks for your comments 😀

      Reply

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