Have you ever had a thought you cannot form from words? How do you deal with it?

That happens a lot, especially here. I will often think of a point that I want to put across but not know how to do so. It’s very frustrating. I usually just sit and wait until the inspiration comes to me.

For me it will be when I am trying to convey the complex mixture of feeling, emotions and desires that often come as a tidal wave when love for a special person is at play.

Also when my kids royally piss me off there it is a delicate balancing act between what I feel and want to say versus what I should actually say as their parent.

To translate from the inchoate thought to a clear piece of prose is always the writer’s challenge. You have to write a lot, regularly, learn the precise definition of words, re-read, sleep on it, re-read, edit, reclarify etc. It is very difficult.

One exercise that I have found helpful is to read good writers and analyse how they do it.

Sometimes keeping a private journal and using stream of consciousness helps you feel better and shows you what you do not want the public to read.

I get the all of the time. It’s annoying as all hell. I’ve found it’s very similar to the way in which communication occurs in my dreams. Which is just as useless when trying to describe it to someone else.

Not terribly often, since I stopped smoking weed about 35 years ago. I still have the “Waow!” moments, but I can also verbalize the thought that creates the moment. Except that nowadays individual words occasionally dance around the edge of my consciousness and I can’t quite grab the exact one that I want for a few minutes.

On the other hand, I have a much larger vocabulary now, too, so the workaround isn’t so difficult. And I know that word will come to me eventually, so I wait it out if I have to.

All good answers, thanks.

@gailcalled It often happens when someone asks me about something abstract, not just when I am writing. Someone can ask me what I think on an issue, and I just want to answer “Well….. that! Do you know what I mean?” Then before I do, I realise that they really don’t know what I mean by “that”. Its not so much forgetting words, that happens all the time anyway, it is being unable to do thoughts justice because the appropriate words have connotations that can lead to confusion and disturb the purity of the thought itself.

Paint it.

@robaccus Interesting idea, but not really appropriate for a colourblind, artistically challenged person like myself. I can do average line drawings, but even that takes a few hours of experimenting and throwing paper in the bin.

That really is what art is for. And everyone is artistically challenged. What would be the fun if it wasn’t a challenge. I remember the first play I wrote. I didn’t know what it was about while writing it, but by the time I wrote it and directed it, I understood. The play was terrible, but I understood myself better. It would still be hard to articulate the idea, but I know at least one other person got what I was trying to express. Some ideas need expression through other mediums than language

All the time. Such is the nature of ASDs (including Aspergers).

It leads to a lot of frustration, and I generally don’t deal with it well. I get bitchy.

Rarely. If it is a nebulous thought and I feel that it must have verbal expression, I work with it until I have it right. Metaphor is often my recourse in those cases. If the idea eludes me before I can nail it down, perhaps it wasn’t so clear after all.

Some thoughts and states that we would categorize as “right-brain” nonverbal thoughts can be expressed in a nonverbal form such as painting or music.

I am not a compulsive archivist of my thoughts. There are dream states and meditative states that cannot be captured in words, but the experience is no less mine, and there is no need to share it. “Ineffable” is a word for those.

i pray

My thoughts always take verbal form and I am rarely ever at a loss for words.

@Dr_Lawrence Lucky you; I often have to borrow “someone else’s words“http://www.grandin.com/inc/visual.thinking.html

Like Dr. L; I can almost always articulate what I am thinking. I have been interested in and working on that skill for decades. I remember going to my first husband’s college graduation (from that school in Cambridge, MA). To my shock, there were two words on the front page of the college newspaper (in the headlines) that I had never heard of. I had finished three years of a top-tier college, and had to head home to the dictionary after the ceremony.

After that, I never let a word or expression escape me. I take pride in being able to both speak and write clearly, most of the time. MY dictionaries are more dog-eared than my cookbooks, which tells you something.