What's your biggest struggle as a writer?

The first sentence :expressionless:
All the other parts are done, except for the beginning.

Oh, and also recognizing and expressing emotions. I fail at that.

This is probably just me, but I tend to prefer simple action scenes over detailed ones. I really just need a blank statement of what they’re doing so I can fill in the embellishments and interpretations. This is how I usually write action scenes (directly from my demo):

TW: Vulgarity, violence

You put your foot on the gas pedal and begin shifting gears, feeling the car lurch forward and then begin speeding down the road. The woman isn’t expecting you to run her over, so she tries to jump up onto the hood. The car slams into her and she rolls into and then through the windshield, landing on the seats in a shower of glass shards. Mike screams and grabs the woman’s wrist to prevent her from using the gun. He tries to climb on top of the woman and starts throwing punches, which the woman tries to dodge. “Get out of our truck, bitch!” Mike shouts.

“You’re fucking dead!” The woman shouts, trying to fight back as much as possible.

Mike needs help to kill the woman before she hurts you both, but you also need to drive, and you’ve got turn coming up. You can do both, but one needs more focus than the other. Which one do you focus on?!

Choice: Making the turn!

You trust that Mike can handle himself, so you focus on your driving. There’s a left turn coming up ahead, and you keep your eyes glued to the road as Mike struggles with the woman.

The woman suddenly breaks her gun-holding hand free and strikes Mike in the head. Your reach over and grab her arm as she pulls the trigger, shooting a bullet into the roof. The shot blasted your eardrum, and now you hear ringing as you keep driving.

“You fucking bitch!” Mike quickly reaches over and wraps his hands around her throat, choking her as you restrain her arm. You see the turn coming up and quickly take it. Mike reacts accordingly and slams the woman’s face into the dashboard, smashing her repeatedly into the radio.

She eventually stops struggling, and Mike throws her body to the floorboards. Blood is streaked all down the radio, and on Mike’s hands. “Motherfucker…”

I don’t know that this type of simple writing is everyone’s cup of tea, but I definitely prefer clearer action scenes. Sometimes, fighting is just fighting, and it doesn’t need to be an important spectacle or a major event unless it’s an important fight that deals with strong, developed characters with a history, like Luke versus Vader. Like, do I really need to place importance on my MC and their RO killing a random, unnamed woman? Can I just show the fight and the struggle without drawing it out? She gets in the car, RO kills them, MC either helps or doesn’t, and then she’s dead. It’s a fun spectacle that shows MC and RO working together and establishes their trust in one another in high-octane situations. Simple as that.

The goal can be accomplished without writing every itty-bitty detail. I don’t need to place importance on the brutality of RO slamming the woman’s face into the radio, and I can let the readers infer whatever they want from the actions I do write. Are MC and RO comfortable with killing people for their survival? Sure. Is RO unnecessarily brutal? Maybe. Did RO do exactly what they needed to in that situation? Probably. If anything, the ability to let readers fill in certain blanks is the real beauty of simple action scenes.

I may not have answered what you were asking for but I figured I’d contribute to this particular discussion since I write a lot of action scenes in my stories often. :slight_smile:

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Someone once told me, or perhaps I read it, that with particular scenes – action, sex, etc – the only ones that really warrant description are firsts and lasts.

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raises hand me! I’m a firm believer in the power of games to make people able to experience a point of view that is not their own. IF is perfect for that, and I believe that a main character with severe social anxiety could give a very powerful look into how it is to live with something like that

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Motivation ;____; got a WIP of my game but too chicken to actually finish it lol

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I have the same problem. I’m excellent at coming up with ideas and writing the first bits of them but then I either lose steam once the idea has been put on paper or I have trouble writing anything beyond a one shot. I have this fanfic story I’ve been writing for years that I haven’t updated in about two because I either don’t have the motivation to continue writing or the though of continuing makes me procrastinate on it even more.

I’m excellent at writing anything sad or tragic because I’ve had depression for so many years that a lot of it is simply okay think of this scenario and how you would feel and either write that or magnify it to how the character would feel and bam sadness. But tell me to write something funny and I’ll sit there like a deer in headlights wondering what deity I pissed off to be punished like this.

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  1. General struggle. Describing stuff. I hate it, but I need to improve in this area. In my perfect world, I would write something like graphic novels where I could focus on plot and dialogue, but I don’t see that happening any time soon. And really even with comic books and graphic novels, the writer still has to describe stuff to the artist (although this could be in a conversation or other more informal way).

  2. Struggle with writing interactive fiction. Main character dialogue. This really (really) bothers me. Even after writing about 360,000 words of CCH, I still have no idea how to write extended dialogue for the main character. Sure, I can write a short question or comment in a choice. But extended conversations? I’m afraid that if I just write some dialogue on a page, some readers will respond with, “I’m the MC and I would never talk that way.” So instead, I write most dialogue through NPCs and have the MC react through a choice. But it’s choppy this way, and never gets into a deep flow.

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I hate trying to spell that too. It doesn’t help that I encountered a rogue character named Subelety, and now I think that’s how it’s spelled.

I feel you on the dialogue thing. I happen to suffer from what I call “Inquisitor Syndrome”, referring to a 2D game that had you ask questions as your only dialogue choices and every response was the author vomiting 3 exposition paragraphs from a character that doesn’t have a reason to talk that much.

(Example:
Me: Why are the gates to the city closed?
Guard: It all started after the great demon attack of 1342, when Lord Artemis (the first governor of our fine city) was slew by…)

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Does always forgetting to backup my work count? Had my laptop break down yesterday and logged into my SkyDrive only to find the last time I synced the folder where I kept all my writing projects was apparently three years ago.

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I am paranoid about backing up my work especially since my laptop is about five or six years old by now and updates every few days sometimes without telling me or giving me a choice to say no. I hate it even more when I write something on paper and it gets lost, I freaked out on my mom once because she cleaned my room and threw away papers and some of them were notes for an original story that had no other copies or backup and I only found one out of the two papers after I dug through the trash. There’s a reason I kept my room messy as a system, I knew where everything was and where each paper was hidden because different spots were for different inspirations.

Oh, that’s really good! Now I am more confident in put things like that in my current WIP.

Let’s begin with the search!

I’m bad at describing things. I find it difficult to go into detail when I’m trying to paint a scene, and I usually spend an absurd amount of time trying to put together the right words to convey what I’m trying to describe.

I’ve been trying to get better at this, and I have, to some degree. Still a bit of a problem, though.

My greatest struggle is actually writing. I am a total abysmal failure when it comes to creativity. I could brainstorm for hours and get a few good concepts, but when it comes to developing them, my mind just turns off. I’d rather code while someone wrote the story. I’m far more comfortable with that.

Number 3 on my list:
Keeping projects small…
I once thought Curious Cuisine e.g. would at best be 300k words long… judging by the outlines that number has tripled

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I won’t say i’m a writer but whenever i want to write something…the biggest challenge is to actually write the damn thing!
I can write up a character bio, story plot and whole world and its history…but never the story itself T_T

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Trying to please everyone is a real pain in the a**. And never quite possible. :confused: At least not if you want to stay true to your game and the characters you’ve imagined.

I try to balance my own idea and other people’s idea on how it ‘should be’…yet, some still aren’t happy. - Which is fine, duh, It’s just something I struggle with. xD

My biggest issue - and possibly the one real issue I have - is when people want an equal amount of romance options for each preference. I give them (non gender locked -) 3 females, 2 males, 1 nonB but they think I should add in more, or genderflip. In a game where romance is not the main theme, might I add…It’s frustrating. :confused: I’m sorry I didn’t imagine these characters being male or nonB, it just happened. I imagined them to be female (for example) and genderflipping could do more harm then good…I can work with removing gender locks (did that), but I can’t possibly add an equal amount of females, males and nonB main characters to my game… So yeah, that’s my …biggest…if not my only issue…

This all sounded like a bunch of whinnying though, sorry about that. xD Just needed to get it off my chest. Since it’s really eating me up I can’t just ‘fix’ it, somehow…without making a crowd, without making a mess…just someone please tell me how I can ‘FIX’ it, so that everyone will be happy!!! XD

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Write your story - then, once you have a complete draft of it, you can tinker with balance and other issues.

Oh man…I really do try to balance stuff. :slight_smile: But there will always be people who won’t like it still, since it’s not completely “the other way around”…

Any idea how i can solve the ‘equal number of RO’s’ though? Without it messing up my story?

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Write your story first. If, as you write, you find a place to add a NPC for romantic purposes, consider that option then.

The hardest thing to accomplish is writing a complete story and coding that story into a game. Once you do that you have time to rewrite and test balance and make changes. Once you get to this point, find some really good testers and set out to make the most of them helping you.

@ParrotWatcher is a really focused tester and can help you (if he isn’t too busy locking tongues with his b/f :wink: ). There are others in the community that will help you too. …

You can try to do everything at once but usually, that is a hard road to travel.

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