What do you find hardest?

I'd have to say structure. I'm revising atm, and making things go where they should go is a monumental pain.

Similarly, pacing. On the sentence/paragraph scale. I find that the first draft is just random thoughts vomited onto the page, which makes revision a major hassle. Once I get good at it, though, it should improve my writing 1000%. Once I get good at it. Which might happen some day :)
 
Always something new springs up as being most difficult every day,

but my biggest concern at the moment is worrying about having two dimensional characters - hence producing ensembles in fiction that should be sparkingly different and diverse but all merge and collapse into a mush of samey-ness and two or so standard characters

At least that's my worry, I might be alright. We'll see at the re-drafting stages.
 
Dialogue and writing too much description...not that it's all bad, I just have to learn to balance the dialogue and descriptions.
 
I'm with Mouse on the dialogue.

I started with scripts, and I still see the story as a movie in my head. For me, the hardest is writing it from a characters perspective and not the viewer. It's all too tempting to write that big sweeping scene.

Finishing a novel length story is something I'm working on. I wouldn't class it as hard, since this is really the first time I've put effort into attaining it.
 
Selling.

That's it.

I produce a great book, do everything I can to promote it (which isn't much, given the industry's ability to block newbies and independents, and readers' assumption that Independent=Suckage), and it falls into a black hole within seconds of my publishing it.

If anything threatens to make me stop writing and take up belly-button-lint-picking, it's the selling process.
 
Plot and pacing. Specifically, I come up with great plots, but when I actually start writing the damn thing goes off the rails. I wind up writing whole sections that I have to throw out, write from another angle, throw it out again.

With pacing, I can do it, but I seem incapable of doing it right the first time. It's like trying to peck out a tune on the piano. I have to hit the wrong notes so I can compare them to the right notes that are in my head. It'd be nice to be able to play the tune right from the start.
 
I realize now that I lose track of where I'm going with a scene. Odd things, like a child having a temper tantrum in a bathroom then the whole room goes up in flames. "I told her to leave me alone," she said sweetly. :eek:
 
I find first person incredibly hard. I've tried writing in first person and it just sounds so cheesy.

Also, I think I write too tight, perhaps. I've been told I resolve conflicts too quickly and too neatly. I need to learn to loosen up and let things play out a bit more.
 
I said:
I find it easy to put words together, but writing very well is very very hard. :)
Click to expand...

Yes, it is, but I enjoy that bit. I love the challenge. I love the play of finding just the right verb for a given action, or knowing when it hit home with a short sentence or paragraph.

For me that hardest part is anything outside the writing. I read interviews by authors who seems to enjoy protracted research (Guy G Kay, Ian McDonald), or by authors who say editing is the best bit (Alastair Reynolds, Joe Abercrombie). Personally, I'm a grump when I'm researching or editing.

For a perfectionist, editing is torture.

Coragem.
 
I find it hard to edit. I like to just work on something new. And the longer it is after I complete a story, the harder it is to integrate suggested changes. I have always been a hesitant kind of person, and this is something I am working to overcome.
 
Right now translating a work from present tense into past tense. I have no bother writing in either but changing it over ...
 
My biggest problem that I'm aware of right now is writing action scenes.
Stuff happens in every scene, and every scene advances some part of the plot(s), but when I try to make someone throw a punch, it just ends up clunky and difficult to follow.

I'm sure I have a great deal of other problems... I just haven't realised it yet. :D
 
This is a very comforting thread.

I'm sitting at the moment with six or seven stories, including a novella that I can't move forward or finish. It is a kind of crisis of confidence -- everything looks thin and implausible although some of the writing itself isn't bad and has promise. I just don't know how to move any of it forward.

I'm usually a fairly pragmatic and decisive writer and this is the hardest 'stuckness', self-doubt, whatever, I've had to go through. Ugh.
 
I'm with Steve Jordan, but I'd have said, "Marketing." But perhaps for different reasons. I've always had an aversion to tooting my own horn, and I find it difficult to do so. I have a web site, but have to really force myself to add to my blog. I can crank out 20,000 words of fiction in a weekend if the muse has struck me, and find it almost impossible to squeeze out a few hundred for my blog. And I spend hardly any time on Kindleboards or Goodreads. I don't know how to fix that other than self-abuse.

A lesser problem I have: changing a character's name after I've gotten used to one. It's almost impossible.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Thread starter Similar threads Forum Replies Date
L Cannot find a 1990s/early 2000s story about (ultimately erroneous) biological differences between Catholics/Protestants/ alternate history Book Search 5
Robert Zwilling Need to find a complete list of google text app settings and options Technology 0
Ian Fortytwo Books that you find hard to read after watching the film. Book Discussion 25
K (Found) Trying to find title of older (I think) sci fi book. Book Search 4
Swank "Serious" SF - hard to find Book Discussion 13

Similar threads


Back
Top