: This comes down to what exactly you mean by "while writing." To me writing is the act of getting the story down, just as laying out the plot is preparing, and editing and proofreading are

@Berryessa137

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This comes down to what exactly you mean by "while writing." To me writing is the act of getting the story down, just as laying out the plot is preparing, and editing and proofreading are different stages again.

With that in mind any online resource can be a distraction. That's one reason why I've favoured pen and paper for so long: it doesn't matter how good your first draft is, you can get access to the net and all that shiny stuff once you're cleaning it up.

By now you probably know that I love WriteLaTeX.com, but even that can be distracting -- going off to look for some formatting code for instance. Hell even the squiggly red lines of a spell checker error can be distracting where you're trying to get in-the-zone.

So perhaps the tipping point is being online in the first place; as soon as you stop writing to go look something up you've been distracted. By the time you get back you may have to ramp up your flow again.

As an example, I was recently reading a Charles Stross book, Singularity Sky. At one point a man was talking to another man who was smoking a pipe. The pipe was being used as a dialogue beat but halfway through the conversation the man was smoking a cigar and the beats related to what actions that may entail. Clearly he'd stopped writing mid-section and had then forgotten the man was smoking a pipe.

Luckily there's a very simple solution to all of this, and I tend to use it even when I'm online: Anything you want a synonym for, don't know the name of, or don’t have the exact detail of: wrap a quick description of what you want to go there in square brackets and then just move on.

The landscape was littered with the jagged and tumbling corpses of [mine shaft
tower things], abandoned after the Source was discovered -- the only things standing on the barren tundra.

When I'm editing, then I can go find out that a mine shaft tower thing is called a Winding Tower.

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