What was hard to write?

[pmmg]

So...In our long writing careers, I am sure we have all had to address many difficulties along the way. I wonder what some of you would consider the things that you found the hardest to get right on paper. What was particularly hard about it? How did you handle it? And do you think it succeeded? If for whatever reason, you wanted to tackle it again today, could you improve it?

(Feel free to use a loose definition of hard.)

 

[Devor]

Honestly, the area I'm struggling with right now is character building through flashbacks and other references to their past or backstory. I can pull off most other things well enough, some with a bit more effort than others, but every time I mention a character's past, it always feels like a log dropped on the narrative. Hey-hey-look at that backstory hint! Let's drop everything and ask what this character's been through! How heavy does this bit of PTSD actually need to be anyways? Confused or curious about what happened there - which will it be, and why it always the first one? Ugh. So annoying.

 

[pmmg]

For me, the flashback scenes felt like a natural direction. They have their own narrative and story arc to tell, and clear transition. One character in fact, is being told from birth the death over the course of the story. Here in book 4 though, I am not feeling the past scene format is required. This may be the first book that does not show the earlier years of one of the characters. I thought that might continue throughout. I am still wrestling with it. Include it or not? My sense is not.

IMO, the flashback scenes fit in, because they are almost a story in the story, and not really....'here reader, know this before I continue'. It is through the backstory scenes that the larger conflict comes to life, and its reach is shown to be much greater than even the characters know. And with each book, it becomes more intricate as more details involving more of the cast comes to light.

For myself, I think my hardest scene involved a very chaotic mess of a scene with one character acting in a way that made no sense (threatening violence), and in the midst of two groups of people, all of whom did not speak the same language. So, having all the people react, and communicate, and translating it for the reader so it could be understood, and getting to the why, while keeping some of the mystery...it was a mess. Did, I pull it off? I think so.... Could I do it better...I don't think so without just changing the story too much.

Recently, I had what I now call 'the dreaded scene'. Its was the one scene in the book where we got a POV that was just different than the whole rest of the tale. I tried many many ways to work around this. Cutting the scene, different POV's, literally took years to decide how to handle it. I think I have it now. I never plan to revisit it again. Ultimately, I just deleted and rewrote it, and the scenes around it to make it work without the POV switch. A small thing, but I think it works now.

Guess readers will let me know.

Also, with PTSD, I think the heavier the better.

 

[Incanus]

A great question. I had to think about it.

Like Devor, I've had some trouble with character backstory. I have a scene in my current WIP that appears rather early, and it has two characters talking about a third character's backstory. It didn't seem to be working all that well as I did it, and I think now it will probably be cut or changed somehow. The character's backstory seems interesting enough on its own, and yet when I try to include it, it just seems clunky or intrusive.

There is another type of scene I consider 'hard', but perhaps in a different way than you mentioned in the initial post. Action scenes. I can get them on paper more or less OK, but I find it really tedious to do so. Which seems strange. I'm not sure why but writing pages of almost pure physical action is draining. I end up doing it in smallish chunks, like 50-150 words at a time.

 

[skip.knox]

It's usually been logistics. I had a hard time in my first novel figuring how to get a Roman legion across a river in the face of a goblin horde. I pulled a fake on that one and contrived it so the goblins just didn't get there in time. The hard part was letting go of the idea of having a battle at the river crossing.

Right now I'm having difficulty with the logistics of a sequence of events. I've got twelve wizards in a tower. Someone is knocking them off one by one. The Trouvères (our heroes) have to find the killer to save themselves ... and yeah, sure, as many wizards as they can.

All twelve wizards were sort of blank slates at first, so I had to develop each character enough to matter, though only some have important roles. That wasn't too bad. The real challenge is deciding who dies when, because at the outside, pretty much everyone is interchangeable. Then I had to leave time and opportunity for bodies to be found, theories to be developed and discarded, and make allowances for certain, er, physical realities. I did try mapping it all out, but that was impossible until I knew who the mages were, so their deaths would mean something inside the story.

It has all been amazingly difficult.

Logistics have been a challenge in all my books, from choreographing fight scenes to just moving characters through a city or a castle. It'd be much easier if things didn't have to make sense.

 

[Renè Williams]

My biggest struggle was choosing when to start my current WIP on the plot line. Too soon, and too much gets revealed too early to make the scenes make sense, too late, and we've missed some key moments for the plots and character arts. This is because one of the 'main cast' has lost his memories and might essentially be a walking bomb, which wouldn't be good for anyones mental health to reveal to them even if they remembered their life before hand, and no one wants to trigger a cascade of memories for him because it's clear him and eight others were held captive in an odd sort of way and almost certainly abused physically and mentally over 20 years. That and, he doesn't remember ever having had magick and now has no aura and only a mundane aether network in his body, which tells those who are trying to help him his magick is gone anyway. It's established pretty much in the first two chapters that this must be the case if the reader is paying attention but the tension of trying to help him without hurting him, i hope, is palpable. But choosing exactly when to start chapter one, before they leave the capital city to go find the other eight, was difficult so that i wasn't just telling the reader this information but showing them

 

[Fyri]

*Snorts* A kiss scene from the MC POV. I was 15 and never been in love nor kissed anyone, but for some hecking reason assumed the story wouldn't be seen as complete or good if I didn't write love and a kiss scene. I remember having to look up how other people write about it and nearly copy paste and being very perplexed about my situation. XD

Today, I know I'm ace and seem to get away with a lot through simple empathy, imagination, and research.

That would probably be the first hardest thing I had to write. The actual hardest thing... I once nearly gave myself nightmares by trying to write a scary enough scene to scare my imagined readers. I feel like when I revise that draft, I'll probably take out the haunted/thriller details, mostly because it might just be tonally off anyway. Certainly didn’t help that I was writing the scene alone at night.

But that's also a particular kind of "difficult". OH. I KNOW.

Making certain characters likeable/realistic. Two specific characters. We'll see if I fixed it in this latest draft.

 

[Fyri]

Specifically, one of my characters has my ADHD, and none of my betas think he's realistic, although he is 9/10 times the favorite character. XD I try to figure out how to make him more realistic or relatable while staying true to his character and I realize he is even more like me and people continue to say it's unrealistic and I just sit there like... "Do people need to meet more of me to understand that people can be like this?"

 

[Super Fantasy]

I find story arcs hard to write.
And also I feel that when there are more than four characters their dialogue can become jumbled.

 

[Super Fantasy]

Say there are six characters, each one very much of different personalities, philosophical views, ability in combat, or of a royalty.

 

[Jackarandajam]

I have layered plot motivations and it's been a nightmare to iron out. I think I've almost got it, but geez.
I've got boots-on the ground good guy motivations and what they know, same with the bad guys.
But then I've got this high level chess match type plot where there is a good guy and a bad guy who are using pretty much everybody in the book to try to check mate each other. The why and how of that, how to show the reader exactly enough and foreshadow appropriately but not too much, so the ending is still wild.... I probably should have had it all up on the wall with red thread running everywhere by now, but I keep trying to compartmentalize each characters motivation in outline format. It feels like trying to do calculus with crayons when I couldn't do algebra with a calculator.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

For me it's crossing the street. Literally, getting our characters from one place to another is my Achilles' Heel. I can get stuck for days on just transitions alone. Give me violence, give me sex. Give me conflict, for pity's sake, but do not tell me our determined protagonists have to cross a bloody street.

 

[Mad Swede]

Given that I started writing for what were intensely personal reasons the things I find most hard to write are those scenes which are closest to certain events in my life. There are scenes which I think of and then have to scrub from the story because they're too hard to write.

 

[Renè Williams]

I find story arcs hard to write.
And also I feel that when there are more than four characters their dialogue can become jumbled.

True, at least for me, I try to keep my characters in parties of 2-3, sometimes 4, anytime convos HAVE to happen beyond a few words about some topic. For some action scenes, having more of the cast around is convenient for pacing for the way I write, especially because normally there's the Main Action and people causing Side Action so the Main Action isn't interrupted by evil henchman or the military.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

True, at least for me, I try to keep my characters in parties of 2-3, sometimes 4, anytime convos HAVE to happen beyond a few words about some topic. For some action scenes, having more of the cast around is convenient for pacing for the way I write, especially because normally there's the Main Action and people causing Side Action so the Main Action isn't interrupted by evil henchman or the military.

We usually run with something like 7 - 9 POV protagonists in any given book, and we also have a habit of having big 'council' meetings, like in The Fellowship of the Ring only with more brawling. The trick to writing conversations with a ton of characters involved is to make sure to bring all of them - their quirks and issues and personality and conflicts - into the conversation with them, and that will help to make them all sound differently from each other. And also work those tags. Speech tags are the best way to explore characters while also conveying information and moving the plot forward. Said isn't dead. Everything is in your toolbox. Work it.

 

[Renè Williams]

We usually run with something like 7 - 9 POV protagonists in any given book, and we also have a habit of having big 'council' meetings, like in The Fellowship of the Ring only with more brawling. The trick to writing conversations with a ton of characters involved is to make sure to bring all of them - their quirks and issues and personality and conflicts - into the conversation with them, and that will help to make them all sound differently from each other. And also work those tags. Speech tags are the best way to explore characters while also conveying information and moving the plot forward. Said isn't dead. Everything is in your toolbox. Work it.

I try to use said about 70-80% of the time, it just makes everything simpler for me, especially when describing things someone is doing during or after their speaking. SO at least i'm keeping that box ticked. If i use a speech tag, it's usually because i want the reader to notice, or because it has gotten late and i haven't reread it yet.

I have quite a number of POVs through my current work, or will anyway, there's five in the first two chapters, but it's 3 different peoples views of each other as scenes play out in the first and intro to the next two in chapter two, or 1.2 as it is right now (Trying an unconventional chapter numbering sequence which i may or may not scrap)


I tried to right a 'round table' type scene my first time through this story, near the end, and it ruined the whole ending for me and all my beta readers, so i have to get better at a bigger group interacting with less action for sure since it's inevitable it'll probably happen near the end of the book regardless, it just sorta makes sense plot wise and around the middle too when everyone sort of ends up in one place during a calm period by accident.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

Given that I started writing for what were intensely personal reasons the things I find most hard to write are those scenes which are closest to certain events in my life. There are scenes which I think of and then have to scrub from the story because they're too hard to write.

I totally get that, at least as far as the fact that I've never been to war will let me. I'll just preface this by saying my parents were monsters. I loved them so very much, but there were a lot of things that needed forgiving but could not bear forgetting. Both you do for you.

My dad died a few months after we published Faerie Rising. Winter loses her father in this book. It's a really good scene and I'm very proud of it, but rereading it is pure hell. We wrote Ties of Blood and Bone next. Another character, another father's death. That one was hard. My mom died while we were drafting Beneath a Stone Sky. Etienne's complicated relationship with his mother and her eventual loss are a major subplot.

After all of this, I spent about six months completely psychotic and a year or more phasing in and out, as a few other medical conditions developed and conflicted with some of my most powerful medications, and someone 'else' apparently was doing the driving. I only know it wasn't me. So, if I was really weird of if I do it again, sorry about that. We call her, "Dolores." My father-in-law named her.

We really, really need to stop killing off parents, but today is not that day, and looking over the plot points for this book tomorrow doesn't look so good, either.

 

[A. E. Lowan]

Way toward the end of our first book, right before the big battle at the end, we have a council meeting with all of the leaders of all the preternatural groups in the city. Big meeting. We've gotten a lot of compliments on it, and I admit I'm really proud of how it turned out, but we also have an advantage. We walk into this room with conflict already turned up to high and driving the story forward. The first fight breaks out on line 3. By the end the meeting has devolved into a full-scale bar fight in our older FMC's dining room, and only the interference of an Unseelie King brings it to a halt.

 

[Prince of Spires]

For me it's 2 things.

One is in line with the sort of thing you'd expect, and I mentioned somewhere here on the site recently. My father-in-law reads my books. Writing scenes that would be hard for him to read (think violence, swearing, etc) are hard to write, just because I'm aware that a respectable 70-year old I know will read the thing and talk to me about it. I have to give myself permission to write those parts and be true to the characters.

The other is very different, and different from what others have posted. And that is scenes where I'm unsure of what will happen. I tend to outline, however I generally outline in broad strokes. When I get to a new scene I usually know the broad strokes of what is going to happen, and then I work out the details a bit and start writing. In some cases however, I only have a very vague idea of what will be happening, and I can't figure out the details. These scenes are a nightmare to write. Each word and each sentence takes an eternity to figure out. The whole process is long and tedious and terrible.

It's usually the "boring" scenes, like A. E. Lowan 's transition scenes, or the aftermath of big action scenes or character moments. Which are important, but on the surface not that much is happening.

 

[pmmg]

The hard part was letting go of the idea of having a battle at the river crossing.

I've been there plenty. Its rare the thing I first imagined actually makes it to the page as I imagined it. Sometimes, its like....I wrote most of this story hoping to include that, but now that I am here....I just doesn't work. In my last story, I swapped out a Dryad like character for a spider, even though the dryad was in my head for like 10 or more years. Just wouldn't work the way it unfolded.

But in part, this is the beauty of the journey. We think we know our destinations, only to find something different came along, and it became a different part of the whole.