Disclosure
July 9th, 2008
One of my writing group people mentioned ‘cluttering’ as a speech disorder, while we were discussing dialogue. I went and looked it up. I read the Wikipedia page. It made me kind of uncomfortable, so I showed the page to Kevin, asked him what he thought, and didn’t think about it the rest of the day.
It made me uncomfortable because it was very familiar. Rapid, disorganized speech. Forgetting specific words. Performs better at language tasks when stressed. Repeating the same word over and over again, half-finished sentences, random clauses, missed words. Impatient, interruption-prone. Giving the appearance of being frustrated to listeners without actually being frustrated, so that the listeners try to change the subject to soothe the apparent frustration, causing real frustration. Messy, sprawling handwriting. Mostly unaware of how they sound to other people.
Kevin said, “That’s my girl!” He spent the day reading all about it. He thinks it’s fascinating and interesting. I was just embarassed.
He said, “I figured that you just had so much to say that it gets jumbled coming out. And that’s the conclusion other people have come to as well.”
I said, “Well, it must not be too bad, or I’ve learned to compensate or something, because I’m better at writing than most people with this disorder seem to be. Possibly that’s even why I’m more comfortable doing things in a written form– phone calls, games, etc.”
But today I was writing and I stumbled over a sentence. I stared at it and I realized I was ‘cluttering’ it– stating one thing, modifying it, and then modifying the modifier. I fixed it, but I realized that was one reason that so often I write so slowly, and why I get so frustrated with myself.
Later, I was thinking about what to write next, and I knew I had three mini-events I wanted to write and I wanted to write them all at the same time. And I couldn’t, and sequencing them, choosing one to start with would probably make the others not come out as I imagined. And I recognized that I’d been in that position before– uncertain what to write next because I had too much and it was poorly organized. And that my usual reaction to that kind of frustration was to find a distraction and stop writing.
And now I feel weird. On the one hand, recognizing this will probably help me accept the frustration and move on. Eventually. I mean, now I know why writing’s so hard these days (although have I come up with theories for why in the past? I’m sure I have…)
But right now I’m in a kind of self-pitying shock. QQ. Well, not shock. We’re not at the elevate feet severity. But definitely self-pity. I used to be proud of my writing. I used to think writing was easy. Now I’m whiny and sad that the easy writing days of yore aren’t ever going to come back, that this isn’t a funk I’m in that I just have to snap out of. I can’t wait it out or write it out. All I can do is try to recognize it and move through it and take every opprotunity the revision process offers. All I can do is work. And I’m lazy!
Although I still don’t know what to do about the ‘want to write 3 things next’ problem. I don’t know if I should try to work around the hard parts (write all 3, and decide later!), or force myself through them (pick one and move on with the story as it flows from there, bozo! Even if it frustrates you!).
And I’m suddenly terribly self-conscious about even writing blog posts.
Somebody on the web said it had gotten worse for them after they left college. Me too. Less semi-public speaking, I suspect. Bleah.
Categories: Updates From the Void, Writing |
Hrm. I’m going to have to look at what cluttering is. It seems to me that some of the symptoms may overlap with the ADD symptom cluster.
Certainly, my ability to write long pieces of text has decreased dramatically since high school - I noticed even in Carleton how it had gotten much harder to write papers by my senior year. I figured that this was mostly because I’d gotten out of practice by heavily loading my schedule with courses that required no papers. (Note that math majors don’t have to write anything for their comps)
And I think that may be mostly what it is with you. I know that some people have taken on the project to write a blog entry per day specifically as a sort of writing training. And really? That might be what you need to do. Make a second blog, and find a way to post once a day. (This might be easier if you decide that you’re never going to post about your life, for days when nothing interesting happened)