January posting meme: writing, the easy and the difficult

[hedda62]

enemyofperfect asked: What's a part of writing that comes easily to you, and what's one that's difficult? (Does it depend how ease and difficulty are defined?)

It's a good day to answer this (briefly) because I am writing, and therefore the easy and the difficult (which I think speak for themselves in definition, though there's a sliding scale) are laid out in front of me and tugging me in and out of the file.

Things I find relatively easy:

1) Stopping in the middle of a sentence for twenty minutes while I research something. Okay, that's a snippy answer, but I'm at ease with deciding when to research, how long to research for, what to look for, and how to use it when I go back to writing, which is not a small thing.

2) Usually, dialogue and character interaction. Voices in the broad sense and the narrow one.

3) Glomping on to metaphors and torturing them half to death.

4) Rhythm, sentence construction, word choice. Actually, those are all hard, but I enjoy doing them.

5) Editing. Well, easy-ish.

Things I find hard:

1) Plot, but I'm getting better all the time. Pacing, ditto.

2) Keeping a mental picture of all the characters on stage at once, and using them in active ways.

3) Remembering to put in the physical details that make writing pop. Smells, tastes, the way things feel when you rub your cheek against them.

4) Shitty first drafts.

5) Stopping when it's not going well.

And heh, you asked for one thing in each category, but limiting myself is something else I'm terrible at.

Comments

[philomytha]

Ha, a lot of these match mine, both the easy and the hard, with the exception of research. For me that tends to feel like a boring chore that I procrastinate on, but then when I start it I find that hours later I know a lot about how to navigate the Bow Back rivers (this happened to me this evening) even though I'd found out the answer to my question in the first five minutes.

What do you mean by finding shitty first drafts hard?

[hedda62]

I just can't do them. And I think sometimes it's of value to just get the words down however they happen so that you have something to work with, but I'm always fiddling and fine-tuning as I go and sometimes (often) that means I get stuck a few paragraphs in.

[philomytha]

Huh, I'd heard of that approach but I'd never made the connection between that and what I do. I can't type a shitty first draft because it's way too easy to edit and tinker as I go, but I can write one on paper, and then when I type it up the polish appears. I think it helps that my handwriting is barely legible when I get going, so I can't fuss over what I've already written without having to stop to decipher it first.

[eris]

deciding when to research, how long to research for, what to look for, and how to use it when I go back to writing, which is not a small thing.

Oh man, from where I'm standing that is the most enormous thing. I can only hope to get there someday. /admires
I identify with everything in that second list, though. I get a bit annoyed with how often writers are advised to allow themselves terrible first drafts 'just to get words on the page'--as though there's an easy off-switch to the editor-brain?

[hedda62]

I'm not going to say I don't get unreasonably distracted by research on occasion (there are so many interesting things out there!) but at some point I must have absorbed that there's a distinction between sufficient and perfect, and I'm trying to go with that.

But along the same lines - I never have perfect first drafts (or perfect final drafts, for that matter) but I can't let something really awful sit there niggling at me; it has to be FIXED NOW.

[enemyofperfect]

Eee, I only asked for one of each because I didn't want to overwhelm you! I relate to a lot of these, but especially to shitty first drafts, oh my word. /o\ I do not really understand how those work.

[hedda62]

I don't either; I mean, I understand the principle and occasionally I can hand-wave one or two things that I know suck, but not an entire draft of suck with one or two gems.

[eight_of_cups]

Re: shitty first drafts. I don't really do them either, at least not as one does NaNo, where you just put words on a page and call it progress, because that's just not how it works for me. I think it's largely that the shitty first draft is the one in my head -- handwaved plot points, overwrought dialogue, purple prose, rickety structure, amorphous characterization. The process of transferring that draft to the actual page is sort of a process of depixellation, in which the first thing to emerge is usually a volley of dialogue, which sometimes I'll jot on an index card for reference while I'm working toward it. My clutch of index cards is the only evidence I have of an alpha draft. What winds up on the page is a beta draft (because it goes to my betas! ha) and is reasonably coherent.

I admire very much your talent for rhythm and word choice -- your prose is fluent and evocative without being garish; it's delightful to read and enviable to contemplate. :)

[hedda62]

That is a very good way to put it, and I'm sure I do the same. The actual process of writing is the first stage of editing.

[orockthro]

2) Keeping a mental picture of all the characters on stage at once, and using them in active ways.

Ug, this is sooo hard. Thank you for spelling out the issue so clearly! I was trying to frame it like, "having a full cast" but that's not quite right. It's making them part of the story that's hard, not having them there. Having them where you need them when you need them, not before, and not in a contrived way.
@__@

Great list! :D

[hedda62]

Hint: Lego figures. I actually did this while writing a particular action scene in Time for Tea. But it's probably more of an issue when you have characters you want to include who need to have an excuse to make it into scenes. Sometimes, unfortunately, they just don't belong there.

@___@ indeed.