Being a writer, I’m supposed to be good with this four letter thing called: words.

Haha, yes that was a math joke. Anyway.

Words are hard. I over think words. A lot. Too much actually. I put so much pressure on myself to come up with that perfect one, that my brain shuts down and I find myself going on Dictionary.com, trying to find the word that I’m thinking of, but not thinking of enough to remember.

You have to have it done to you before you understand.

The thing about words, though, is that there are practically millions of ways of saying just one thing. It’s when we over think and doubt and rewrite that we start losing what we were trying to say in the first place. Or, when you’re trying to find just one word, yet you can describe the same exact thing in a cooler way.

For example. The person (no offence to who said it, I apologize, I just can’t remember) who said “don’t tell me it’s night time. Show me the moon in broken glass.” Deep, right? Love that.

In my situation, I’d be so focused on a cool way of saying “night time” that it wouldn’t even occur to me that just by mention of the moon, I can convey the same meaning.

While editing my novel, I wanted to show one of the characters trudging toward two people, then stopping in her tracks, startled, when she sees their clothes. Of course, for whatever reason, I can’t just write it like that. (Ps, sometimes just explaining what you’re trying to explain on paper helps you get the words out.) I went over this paragraph a few hundred times. Then, God sent, I had the idea of describing her hair swinging to her face from her jolted stop. It was so beautiful that I had this epiphany and needed to share it with you.

Not only was I able to say what I wanted to say – basically that the chick stopped in her tracks – but I was also able to add the visual of her hair. Then I changed the word “hair” to “curls”. *angelic chorus singing*

If you find yourself staring at sentences like this, or trying to find other ways to say “night” without actually saying “night”, try to describe it instead. Describe how you see this coming about in your mind; colors, reactions, etc. Readers, and yourself, will be saved from dying of boredom and you’ll feel good about yourself when you go back on your third reading and can “see the moon in broken glass”.