Freedom, Finally

My letter ban finally been dissolved. I am allowed to use all twenty-six letters of the alphabet again. For those of you who were wondering, I wasn't allowed to use the letter F. Hopefully, I actually succeeded in doing it. (A lot of posts were written half unconscious, so I may have slipped here and there.)

This has been an absolutely fascinating experience. Although the letter was chosen randomly, F is one of the best choices to try writing without. It is surprisingly less common than I expected, yet still common enough to be a real thorn in my side. 

What I loved most about this challenge was finding out that I could succeed in it. Any phrase that has an F in it has a synonym or an alternate way to word it such that I can say exactly what I want without being particularly encumbered. 

That said, it still was a challenge. Not being able to say "if" and "of" was a real frustration. Yes, there are ways to get around them, but they always felt strange or awkward. And that was a big thing for me - I felt awkward wording things the way I did. In avoiding F's, I had to write not in my standard voice. I don't know if other people caught it, but I certainly felt not right writing certain sentences. 

I am happy that this lasted for a month, though, because it wasn't until the last week or so that I truly got in the groove. I was used to avoiding the common mistakes. I knew the alternate phrases that avoided F and still sounded good. I didn't reach a point where I instinctively avoided them, but I ran across them far less frequently and I circumvented them quickly.

The one thing that consistently messed with me was how many words have an F-sound but don't use an F. Anything with a 'ph', for example. But also, the phrase "have to" uses an F-sound. The reason it bothered me so much is that I speak everything I write as I write it.  It's usually not vocalized, but I mouth it and do it under my breath. At the very least, I think it in my mind as I type it. I was able to prevent myself from using F by having a mental red flag pop up every time I felt my lips making the sound, but that ended up giving a lot of false positives.

Ultimately, I am very glad to have had this experience. It was an amazing ride and I would truly recommend it as a challenge/exercise to any writing student. I learned a lot, gained insight on myself and my abilities, and have a fun story to tell. I was a little concerned that, when the experiment ended, I would be stuck in that mode, but I can tell by this post that I'll be just fine in that regard.