Great at Writing, Bad at Communicating

You'd think, as a writer, I'd be better at communicating with other human beings.  Umm, no.  I'm actually quite bad at it.  

You see, while being a writer is all about successfully communicating ideas, with writing there's the whole editing process to help us do that successfully.  Put the words down on paper (physical or digital) and then go back and rewrite them and rewrite them and rewrite them until the meaning is clear.

In person, you have one shot.  Sometimes you might have time to think it through and edit it in your head before it comes out of your mouth.  Other times?  Not so much.  

As a writer, you also have the benefit of other people editing your stuff before it pops out into the real world.  Beta readers and actual editors can catch your words when they don't make sense or their meaning isn't quite what you wanted to convey.  I don't have that when I'm face to face with another human being.  And my internal editor, the one who's supposed to be catching things before they come out of my mouth, is incompetent.

I'm especially bad at communicating when I'm tired.  And if the person I'm communicating with is also tired, the results can be bad.

The other day, the last day of helping my friend, we got a late start.  About two hours in, I walked up to her and asked her to tell me what needed to be done because we didn't have a lot of time and I didn't want to be there too late because I hate driving in the dark.  And I was already pretty tired at that point, which is never good for driving in the dark.  I later learned that she took that to mean I didn't want to be there at all, with maybe a side dish of 'screw you' and a sprinkling of 'fuck off'.  When really all it meant was 'we have a lot to do and we're burning daylight, so help me help you get this done so we're not here into the wee hours'.  She didn't tell me this.  She made a snide comment to Hubs, who told me about it a couple days later when I was verbally pondering whether she'd been pissed at me or her husband or the general situation.  Turns out, she was pissed at me.  Huh.

Having a resting bitch face doesn't help.  I often look pissed when I'm really just thinking.  And not thinking about anything really.  Once I was at the corner store, pondering whether I was going to buy lottery tickers and which ones I was going to buy, when the cashier made a comment about how bad my day must be going.  It kind of startled me and then I started laughing.  I explained 'resting bitch face' and what I'd really been thinking about.  She laughed, too.  

As a writer, I can work around all that.  There's no misunderstanding about whether my characters are mad or sad or whatever.  (At least I hope there's no misunderstanding.)  As a person, I'm pretty much screwed.  Lucky for me, Hubs can tell from some other subtle clues or something whether I'm actually mad or whether I'm just lost in thought.

I think I'm not the only writer like this.  We're basically a bunch of awkward teens trying to make their ways in a world that they don't understand and that doesn't understand them.  Or something.  We spend the majority of our time in our heads, hanging out with people who don't exist that we can make do whatever we want.  The interaction with those fictional people pretty much ruins us for interacting with actual humans.

How are you at interacting with real people?  I hope, for your sake, you're not as bad at it as I am.