Word Stumbles

Some of what this post is about I’ve covered before, but I felt the need to flesh it out some more as I find it is important to me.

Dyslexia is an odd affliction. I don’t profess to suffer badly from it but it has been a constant companion throughout my life. After talking to many people who have the condition, I came to realise that each person’s experience of it is different. This post describes mine. Before going on, you might be wondering how a person who suffers from dyslexia can confidently write passages such as this. The simple answer is I can’t. I’m terrified by my dyslexia and what it may lead me to put down on the page. Embarrassment and ridicule have always been a major hang up of mine when writing. So how do I get round it? Well, first and foremost, I read and re-read everything I write, again and again. And yet you’d be horrified by the mistakes that get past this stage. So, then I get my computer to read back every line I have written. You see, I don’t hear with dyslexia, I only see with it. Finally I get someone to check over my work and call out any errors.

So what’s it like inside my brain when I decide to write something? Well, it’s quite a weird place. For starters, what I write is not always what I think. Let me explain.

Ever seen one of those videos where someone asks you to concentrate on how many times a group of people step in and out of a set of rings placed on the floor? No? It’ll be on Youtube for sure, but, note, I’m about to give the secret away. You watch the group intently counting the times they step in an out until the end of the video, proud with yourself that you didn’t miss a single step. Then the video asks - “Did you see the six foot pink rabbit?” The answer of course is no. This is because the video is an old test designed to show how the brain can only concentrate on a couple of things at any one time. The truth of the matter is that, yes, a six foot pink rabbit did just walk straight past you and you didn’t see it. My dyslexia is a little bit like that. Words just seem to move about or change totally without me being able to see them. I can look back again and again and read a totally different sentence from anyone else. It’s a very odd feeling when I spot the mistake. It’s like someone just did a magic trick in front of me, pulling a rabbit out of a hat - rabbits again!

Saying that, this is not the only problem that dyslexia causes me. Another side to it comes when I’m tired or stressed. I can look at an every day word and swear blind it’s spelt wrong. Every fibre in my being tells me the word is misspelt, too many letters, too few letters or total gibberish. The feeling remains until I let go and move on. I have to forget about the word totally for my brain to reset and allow the correct spelling to register. And we’re not talking about complex words here. The other day I got stumped by a four letter word, ‘form’. Just plain weird.

Weird, but oh so frustrating. So, you see, to get to where I am now, with my first published novel whilst working on my second, takes a lot of different methods to get the words out of my head and down on to the page. You might believe that auto correct might help, and sometimes it does. But it can also cause chaos. As I write, auto correct struggles to make sense of what I’ve written. If I don’t spot what it’s up to it might change a bad spelling to another word. When I come to read back my work, my brain superimposes the word I believe I wrote in the first place without actually reading the replaced word - Does that make sense? I hope it does.

So, as I mentioned before, I have one final check with my writing to protect me from all the horrors of my potentially disastrous word-smithing. It’s Simple, I get someone else to check over my work, even before it goes near an editor. Here I must give thanks to the long suffering Joanna and Peter who have patiently endured my vague scribblings. You both have been saint-like.