Most frustrating things about writing stories?

[Outsider]

What do you find the most frustrating things, and what can we suggest to each other?

For me:

1. Writer's block, of course.

I try to write when I get the inspiration, or at least jot down story ideas when I do. I don't use all my ideas. I often center the story around a few ideas but use others in passing.

2. Keeping things consistent.

Since I'm writing in an established setting, I have to keep things consistent with the other stories, with the wiki, and with the rest of my own story. Oddly, the last seems the hardest to pull off. I'm coming up with new ideas which often contradict the old ones.

3. Conversations.

It may not seem this way, but I used to avoid writing conversations in my stories. Now it seems like I mostly write conversations in my stories. Go figure. Nonetheless, I still need to work on my conversation-writing skills. I tend to give all the characters the same habits of speech, the same tempo, the same pauses, the same ums, kindas, and so on.

So what do you find frustrating, and how do you solve your own, and other people's, writing problems?

[AK]

[POST REMOVED]

[WilloWisp]

[q="AK"]There is no such thing as writer's block. If you want to write and finish a story, you make yourself do it - no excuses, no questions asked. Waiting for inspiration is a guaranteed ticket to never finish anything.[q]

I've heard it said that there is no such thing as a difficult task. The only difficulty is doing the task well. If that's a specific quote from someone famous, the original author and context are lost to me, but the meaning still comes through.

Yes, the "just do it" attitude can get a lot of mileage in the writing biz: For several months, I was shunted into writing ad copy for a company I worked for, with little more reason than the fact that I was the only one willing to write 500-1000 words on a weekly basis, covering the products in "an interesting and humorous way."

The problem with the "just do it" approach is that, while it produces a tremendous volume of material, Sturgeon's Law hits hard. If you're writing on a schedule, the quality of your output will suffer. Sometimes, when I submitted the final draft of the newsletter, I felt a little bit of me die. I knew I had written garbage, and that it would neither produce sales, nor amuse customers. But, come Thursday night, the newsletter had to go out, crap or not.

That's not true with hobby-level writing. If you're writing because you enjoy it, then for pity's sake, only write when you enjoy it! You're always going to be better at things you enjoy than things you do as a chore.

-Consistency-

You could always take the old 1960's-1970's BBC approach, and just write what you like, sod the contradictions.

Alternatively, work the inconsistency into the plot. Make it a point of interest, draw attention to it (how it contradicts earlier events, and why anyone would notice) and come up with an in-universe plot twist explaining it. Since most of us are writing science fiction (or at the very least, fantasy) here, time travel is a workable device for tweaking established events, as are parallel universes.

You could go full deus-ex-machina with it, and have a mysterious character or object of unknown origin and powers recurring throughout the stories, changing events, hoping to come up with a decent explanation later.

Lastly, since a lot of us are dealing with mind control elements in our stories, remember that the characters' memories of events are not necessarily reliable.

-Conversations-

Try not to infodump or cabbage-head. If you need to convey information to the reader, present it in context. Don't have a character give four pages of exposition, or explain something to someone who should already know it. Imagine that you're living in your story universe, and ask yourself how you would expect to learn the information you're trying to convey. Characters should only say what they actually would say, given their circumstances. If anything else needs to be said, the narrator should say it.

Listen to real world conversations. Pay attention to how people talk to you (off the internet, mind you), and how you talk to other people. Weird as it sounds, try talking to yourself. Create a simple imaginary scenario with two characters, and have them talk to each other, out loud. In as private an environment as you can possibly manage, of course.

Oddly enough, conversations are rarely a problem for me. Quite the opposite, as I generally come up with the story-related dialogue, then embellish it with some witty banter, insert a few pop-culture jokes, make some of the dialogue a little more sarcastic, and wind up turning a dramatic scene into a segment from Duck Soup.

No, by far my biggest frustration is naming my characters. The moment I name a character with anything similar to a friend or family member's name, that character becomes the friend or family member in my mind, which is almost always completely unlike the character I'm trying to create.

(Disclaimer: I am not a professional writer, unless you're being awfully generous with the definition of the term. When I refer to my writing techniques, I am referring to things I have written outside of FembotCentral. For my writings here, I took the Stephen King approach. I do not consider my writing here to be "fine literature," or even "a good representation of my work." I consider it to be "stuff I wrote because I wanted to read it." That said, there's things in my two stories that, in retrospect, I would probably change, but I don't like the idea of fiddling with a story once it's been released into the wild.)

[Outsider]

I tend to outline the story, figuring out what to explain in each conversation, in each scene, and then write the thing much later. I find that the conversation wanders all over the place, which is good, and hits unexpected topics, which is good, but it can be hard to cover the intended topics.

I thought Orion Medical would work best if Sheila finds lesbianism slightly unnerving (I find heterosexuality rather unnerving, so fair's fair), but, I've changed her attitudes between chapters two and three and may change them again before chapter five. I am exploring the idea that Tom may find reprogramming extremely frightening, but that would interfere with the existing text and with half my draft for chapter four.

But I don't take this too seriously. This is a hobby. This is a fun thing to do. And I am writing the stories I'd like to see. I regard everything I've posted here as my first draft. At some point I may revise this and post the revised, rewritten, expanded version on the wiki.

And I'm hoping to fit the gardeners into one of my stories...

[AK]

[POST REMOVED]

[Brianna 1365 Gamma]

[POST REMOVED]

[ehy]

My experience has been totally the opposite of Brianna's. The best time for me to write is when I have a good idea of how to start, and a vague idea of where I want to go from there. As soon as I know how I'm getting to the end, I lose interest in writing it. You can always go back and rewrite the beginning to better fit the ending you came up with a week or a month after you started writing.

I'm also a big fan of editing and rewriting. It's true that it's usually not as much fun as the original writing... well, actually, on second thought, sometimes it is. It can be very satisfying, sometimes, to take a scene or a paragraph or a turn of phrase that doesn't quite work, and make it sing. But even when it isn't that fun, it makes makes the story a whole lot better. If you're JUST writing for your own satisfaction, maybe that doesn't matter to you, but if you're posting it here you probably hope that somebody besides you is going to like it, and your odds are WAY better if you at least do a quick review.

EHY

[WilloWisp]

Looks like there's enough different - not to say directly contradictory - approaches to writing to fill a few dozen books with nothing more than advice on writing.

Personally, I suppose the most succinct advice I've ever heard on writing came from the lyrics for Diff'rent Strokes. "What might be right for you, may not be right for some."

[Mirage]

Not having the time...

Mirage

[Gorgo]

Not having the time...

And the energy, too.

[Stephaniebot]

Not having the time...

And the energy, too.

I second both of those!

[tectile]

Giving too much detail and background is a problem for me also.

A sentence turns into a paragraph and a paragraph turns in to two.

I'm also very hard on my own work. "This just sounds stupid GRR!" and shelve the story.