What's the easiest and most difficult thing to write for you?

(I hope this is in the right discussion area, first time I created a thread here)

So like the title says, what’s the easiest and most difficult thing for you to write?

Easiest to write for me are probably villains or “dark gray” characters.

The most difficult thing to write would be religion of any kind and yes that includes villainous demon worshipping, baby eating cults as well. For whatever reason I tend to start getting unmotivated and end up slogging through any story branch where I have a protagonist involved as a member of any religion.

(If the hero is fighting said demon worshipping, baby eating cult then it’s a lot easier because in that case the religion is just there as one of the obstacles for him to overcome.)

Oddly I find when I do write such story-lines, they tend to branch a lot more. Not sure if it’s because I’m over thinking everything because it isn’t an area I’m as enthusiastic about writing or because I’m putting forth more of an effort to make sure I don’t gloss over anything since even if its not my favorite thing to write, I don’t want to slack off on it.

Of course one could say “Why not avoid writing religion and make it easy on yourself?” Well I do for the most part and it doesn’t usually play a big role in most stories, but hey sometimes when you’re writing, the story demands that it take you on a different path and when that happens you’ve got to do it!

Easiest (as in, quickest off the pen) - swashbuckling action, betrayals or suspected betrayals, introductions of new significant characters who have been banging around in my head for a while. And yeah, bad people practically write themselves.

Hardest… bringing all the branches of any major choice back together? I err on the side of too much choice. Also, I usually write and rewrite character relationship passages until they feel tight to me, so that usually takes a while. And I find religion sort of a headache to write, too.

Yeah, I usually try to avoid having branches overlap and too much repetition of choice results, but of course sometimes it’s necessary since you might not have a choice that has created vastly different outcomes.

Easiest- Mentor characters, there’s a wealth of media for me to take influence from in order to make them likeable and complex. (in my mind at least)

Hardest- A character intended to be a love interest. Not so much their initial personalities, but the whole romance part I just can not pull off. Mainly because I’m young and stupid and inexperienced with that sort of thing,

Easiest - For CS, that’s be the coding. If find simple logic like to normally come pretty naturally. For actual writing, it would probably be background information. World/Character creation. Spent a lot of hours DMing a lot of different games, so I got into a habit of just build huge amount of background for various worlds that I could always fall back on in a pinch.

Hardest - This one’s kinda hard. I have a lot of weaknesses, but my greatest would have to be keeping a story line stable and coherent. I have a bad habit of just piling on more and more background and ending up with a ton of material which doesn’t actually say very much at all.

Easiest - Descriptions of all kind of things.
Hardest - Dialog that sounds realistic and conveys the right atmosphere.

I found however that using more dialog makes my game more immersive.

I’m more of the reverse in that department. Not that description is difficult, but rather dialog just seems to come naturally to me and I tend to have a lot of it. Even when I write a ton of background description on certain things, I find that I end up writing even more dialog! Another thing I might do is have description, but it’ll be part of dialog. (Someone explaining what something looks like or something similar)

Please note I don’t use ChoiceScript to write my CYOAs.
Easiest-Plot lines/branches
Hardest-Choosing only a few plot lines to go with, DISCRIPTIONS. My gosh, I hate discriptions. I’m okay with discriptions of people and such, but discriptions of places and things like that is hard for me to both read and write. It bores me. I’m sorry, but it really does.

I’ve always been able to easily make settings, usually pretty complex, and characters. My weakness is usually plot advancement (either getting bogged down in one part or dont know how to get where i want to go). Writings solid, I think at least (:

And no, not writing anything but my uncle’s an author and my entire family loves reading/writing so I do have experience with it.

Hardest thing? Villains. I have a hard time getting into a truly nasty mindset. I don’t want to fall into the trap of one-dimensional “they’re evil because they’re evil” villains; I want them to have some sort of believable motivation and personality. It’s even harder in Choice Script because I want to give the player the option to be naughty, but without making it sound like that’s the only reason to take that path. The player should have some sort of justification for amoral behavior beyond just “I feel like being a prick this time”.

Easiest thing? Dialogue maybe? I like giving characters a chance to demonstrate their personalities and play off of each other. Haven’t had a chance to do much of this in Choice Script yet, so we’ll see. :smiley:

I’m fond of introspection. I could write pages upon pages of someone, just sitting in a room, staring out a window and half-consciously commenting on his experiences, his persona, his relationships, that kind of thing. I just love taking characters apart with slowly developing analysis.

What I don’t like is “setting up” for a bigger event later in the story. I’ll have a setting, some basic plot points, and the climax of the scene, but filling in all the flesh and bones between the beginning in the end just doesn’t excite me at all.

Nothing is particularly easy for me but I really, really, really struggle to start anything new. I usually rewrite any introduction 10-20 times. <_>

@CPFace Two tips for good villains (although I prefer the terms pro-/an-tagonist):

  1. Start with the antagonist. And I mean really start with them, before you have a story line or even really concrete idea. The antagonist is arguably the most important character in a story. Any protagonist can come along and thwart an antagonist’s plot, but a good antagonist is tied to their story so tightly that there is no separating them. So go in and form their plot and then tie the protagonist in.

  2. Remember that the antagonist is a person. Don’t write them as evil. Instead, figure out what they want, then figure out how they’d get it. Then you should readily come to the conclusion of who would want to stop them and why. That gives you the protagonist. (If you want one that is ‘evil’ by still relatively deep, just make them ‘practical’, or maybe tack on the trait of sadist, or some other form of insanity.)

I like to think I can write most things well although I will make mistakes if I rush my writing. and my rewrites are always much better than the first draft.

What I find hardest is romance. I wrote a story which eventually had two people fall into a romance and I ended up writing a sex scene. solely because I put effort into the other scenes i felt I had to do the same with the intimate scene. needless to say I regret it and have not wrote a scene like that in 10 years.

My early writing was influenced by my love of anime. my writing now is my attempt to be more mature and realistic.

The easy part- I have whole worlds that I can see the story from begining to end. The hard part-grammer I am Dyslexic so its a real struggle to spell some days. But I if I don’t write I think my head will explode. Lol

i’ve never really tried 2 write a game in ChoiceScript even though it’s supposed 2 be notoriously easy 2 do, but i would say easiest would be writing villainous, immoral, or “dark-grey” characters, which are usually MCs for me. Hardest would probably be thinking of truly great ideas and rememberin to write ‘em down. It’s so hard to come up with truly EPIC Ideas 4 games.
@ EndMaster
U wrote Eternal Right? That game was awesome!
@Anybody
if any one wants help thinkin of truly great game ideas, im your man; a lifetime of comic book readin’ and an over-active imagination can truly help in this business, judging from some of the game ideas i’ve seen.