What makes a story good is the ability to create a lively scene, which makes the reader almost feel like they're right there with the characters. This, however, can be incredibly difficult to achieve, mainly because there are many different situations you must be able to describe in perfect detail. What kind of scenes do you struggle with the most when writing? Is it describing a scene or the environment? Dialogues between your different characters? Active, high-intensity battle scenes?
In general? Myself. I can blame my not writing on any number of things, but in the end it's my own weakness (both physical and mental) that prevents me.
Writing emotional scenes I find these utterly boring often so I don't write a lot of them meaning I don't get enough practice. I also have issues structuring sentences correct sometimes which just make things.
I find that making vivid imagery and describing emotion is my big challenge. Action and movement is almost second nature to me and I can make characters move and flow perfectly. However, I stumble and claw for words that really bring my writing alive. I often describe areas as dark rather than going through the levels of darkness and how that darkness effects the mind of my character. As for emotion, I know when a scene is emotional or needs emotion, but I always fail to grasp what to use as the emotion or I fail to hit the words with the right impact. This often leaves my emotional sections flat and boring. I do try my best to change them so they're not so flat but I always have low confidence with my emotional scenes.
My biggest obstacle is gaining speed once I lose momentum. Once an 'episode' is complete, for instance, I never know quite how to make things move again without things feeling deus ex machina, at least to me. Something I've been advised is "whenever you find yourself not knowing what should happen next, have someone with a gun kick down the door". Which is interesting, I guess? I have a hard time adapting that to non-action parts though, like a slice of life thing. I haven't gotten much personal use out of it, so my biggest obstacle remains.
I struggle most with writing things focused on action and movement. I do best with writing emotions and thoughts, and most movements that I write are small emotion based ones. Whenever I have to write action scenes, it's always clumsy and too fast.
It's always important scenes or scenes I particularly like/have been looking forward to that seem to trip me up. I seem to spend much more time than normal thinking about exactly how I want things to play out and I usually have to play through the scene in my mind several times before I can settle on how best to write it down. This has the unfortunate consequence of making these scenes feel like they should be really long to me - yet whenever I reread them, I'm always a little disappointed that they're over so quickly!
My main obstacle in writing is coming up with compelling characters and conflicts. I’ve had countless ideas for worlds and premises, but they got discarded as soon as I tried to create characters. Usually I have one of two critical thoughts. Either “that character is too one dimensional” or “that’s too cliché.” Maybe if I read a book on the subject and practiced with short stories, I could improve.
