Over and over again....

When I'm proofreading, mine starts to sound like a really wordy direction manual. It's scary.

Yep. I reach a point where I can only see a sentence at a time and am incapable of comprehending the meaning of them all put together. Put the scene aside for a week or two and come back with less strained eyes.

SuzyB said:

Do you ever read something over and over again and it doesn't make sense anymore?

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Yes and the frequency seems to increase with age...

SuzyB said:

Do you ever read something over and over again and it doesn't make sense anymore?

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Actually, this is a normal reaction. Say any one word or phrase over and over and it soon loses all meaning.

All our senses, to varying degrees, depend on change in order to perceive. The most obvious examples are smell and sound. You can only smell anything continuously for a few minutes; if there's a steady noise in the background, after a few minutes you notice it only when it stops. Even vision requires constant change. If your eyes stop darting from spot to spot, you'll go blind in less than one second. (We can't make our eyes stand still, but this was discovered through sophisticated experiments that kept the image in the subject's eyes motionless regardless of how much their eyes moved.)

Hope To The Horizon said:

Yep. I reach a point where I can only see a sentence at a time and am incapable of comprehending the meaning of them all put together.

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johnzakour said:

Yes and the frequency seems to increase with age...

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Put the two of those together and, yeah, I understand.

One night I remember going over the same couple of paragraphs for hours. It was painful and when I finished I went to bed. I decided that in the future, if it's ever that hard and painful again, I'll move on to something else.

Azure Skye said:

One night I remember going over the same couple of paragraphs for hours. It was painful and when I finished I went to bed. I decided that in the future, if it's ever that hard and painful again, I'll move on to something else.

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Yeah, like becoming a doctor or climbing Mt. Everest.

Oh, you mean the writing...you would actually continue this self-abuse like the rest of us?

Wait until the entire m/s is like watching the same damn movie over and over again...that's when you really start to hate it!

SuzyB said:

Do you ever read something over and over again and it doesn't make sense anymore?

?

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Yes. If it happens when I'm doing my first draft I put it aside for a few hours and go and do something else. If I come back to it and it still doesn't make sense then I pitch it. There's no point in belaboring something that isn't working. If it happens during edits, it's gone at once because I generally set aside a manuscript for a few months and come to it as a reader not a writer and then it's very easy to spot and less painful to remove.
Linnea