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.