What Do You Struggle Most With When Writing? (Read 595 times)

[booksoapwriter81]

Hey, fellow writers.  As I sit here trying to figure out how to close out a scene I just wrote, I thought it might be interesting to ask what you struggle with when trying to write a novel/story.  For me, it is the aforementioned closing scenes out strongly as well as beginning them.  I'm usually good once I get going or if I have a certain cliffhanger in mind for a scene.  My characters just kind of take over with the dialogue once they have a starting point.  But for some reason, I just have a really hard time figuring out how to smoothly get them to end a conversation sometimes!  It's like they want to keep talking even if there's nothing left for them to talk about at that particular time and even if they're going around in circles about the same thing.  Does anyone else have this problem?  If so, do you have any suggestions for strong openings and closings?  I find I wander onto the Internet and start procrastinating like I am doing right now when I can't figure out how to start or end something!  And that's not a good thing when work only allows me limited writing time.  

[heroicmuse]

OMG I have that problem too! Scene endings are the worst for me. I sometimes feel like my ending isn't dramatic enough and the scene just. won't. end. Or else I know what I want to happen in the scene but the whole thing feels like it's going nowhere, like the characters are just talking and talking without anything happening.

It's not a bad thing to walk away for a little bit if that happens. I have several games on my phone that are really fast so I'll let myself play one round and then come back to the scene and often when I do it works better. I've also learned that it's okay to have a messy first draft. Sometimes a scene is going to take several tries. I need sometimes to let the characters get their talkiness out of their system and the next day or whenever I write again try again.

If all else fails, when I was in a creative writing program one of the teachers taught us to approach writing as if we were actors playing the roles of the characters. One exercise he often had us do would be to ask ourselves, "If I were this character and I wanted X, what would I do right now?" (X being whatever the character most deeply wants). I do that sometimes when I get totally stuck and it tends to help me break through.

Scene openings can also be challenging for me. When I get stuck there I start with visualizing where the scene takes place. I might describe the location in writing to help jump start the scene. I can always delete extra description later so anything that helps me get going...

Finally, I have a whole folder on my Google Drive called Writer's Block and Rants and if I get stuck sometimes I will sit down and free write about what I'm struggling with and how I feel about it and usually before I even finish writing about it a new idea occurs to me.

Hope some of these ideas help!

[booksoapwriter81]

Thanks for responding, heroicmuse!  I have that same problem with feeling like scenes just kind of die sometimes or drag on without much happening.  I do walk away (actually doing that right now as I am at the end of yet another scene) a lot, and that helps sometimes.  Other times, I have to take the scene to my Writers Group in the hopes that they'll give me suggestions that I haven't thought of.  I do the location description stuff in the beginning too.  Either that, or I make a connection to the scene before the one I'm working on.  This works especially well if the characters in each scene are having similar problems because it shows the connection back to the theme of the book.  I like that suggestion your writing professor made about pretending that the characters are actors or putting yourself in their shoes and thinking about how you would go about getting what you want.  I might try that in the future.  I know my characters so well now that I do know what they want.  However, they're not always real good about getting it because they've got lots of character flaws in the way.