What's easy?

Jo Zebedee

Jo Zebedee

Aliens vs Belfast.
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A companion to Hex's thread - what do you find easy.

Mostly my betas say I write good dialogue and i enjoy writing it. And I tend to have strong characters. My description is better although still sparse in places. And I do good beginnings, although struggle to live up to them sometimes. Apparently I'm also good at torture. So that'll get you all behaving...

So, go on. Blow your trumpet!
 
I have no idea which bits I'm good at because I haven't been at this long enough yet, but I've found plenty of things I'm bad at.

Easy bits (doesn't necessarily equate to things I'm good at): setting scenes, putting my characters through hell, falling for my villain.
 
Descriptions of nature, animals and outdoor scenery.

I am rubbish at describing clothes though. So many times I've forgotten to mention what anyone is wearing... Readers would think all my characters were naked. :eek:

(Their faces arrive before their attire in my mind)
 
Dialogue definitely - that's now officially good which is nice.
Plot as long as I don't produce to much of it.
Characters are nearly always commented positively on.
And basic description of the world or setting.
 
Like goldhawk, I find the ideas come pretty easy to me. New novel/story ideas mostly. But when I need to fill out a character arc, or ways to get reson from A to B, they are generally pretty easy for me as well.
I used to like to think I'm ok at description (but learnt, well really leant, recently the power of simile and metaphor, and so I like to think im perhaos much better now :p )
 
Characters that are pompous arseheads or greedy bounders. Or both.
 
Beginnings. I think.

They sometimes mean the rest of the book has to be a convoluted series of flashback explanations and so I'm not allowed to keep them, but in general I find beginnings quite straightforward. Partly because if the start doesn't work, I don't write the rest of it, and partly because that's how the story turns up in my head -- as a start.

I'm hopeless at endings, though.
 
You utter scallywag!
 
I can't say what I'm good at really because I don't think I've been that prolific and so have not produced a broad body of work on which to get feedback. However the feedback I have had has largely been positive (dear me, does that sound arrogant? I hope not). I think I'm quite good with characters and the odd metaphor, and I think my stuff is pretty original. Whatever, it certainly balances out in my hopelessness with dialogue punctuation.

@springs I think your work is incredibly tidy and very easy to read. So is @Mouse's and I like the cynical/sarcastic edge to her stuff which comes from her character dialogue and thoughts. Also I'm often envious of @Hex, @johnnyjet, @Victoria Silverwolf , @Remedy & @stormcrow in the challenges. Hex, johnnyjet and Remedy often have such chilling concepts that are represented so well by their word choices. Victoria and Stormcrow just have a beautiful writing style. I also envy the humour and tight economy in @The Judge's entries. I'm probably missing a lot from this list and will feel bad tomorrow when I remember, but these names jump out from the top of my head, because they are very often on my shortlists in the challenges.

pH
 
I suppose I should say dialogue, since when I am writing a scene dialogue is the thing that always comes first.

My relatives who don't read fantasy -- but feel obliged to read my books anyway -- always say, "I love your descriptions," which I believe is a polite way of saying that they had no idea what the story was about. (And in any case, I suppose we would all rather that readers loved our plots and, especially, our characters.) There are times when descriptions all but write themselves, but other times when I have to struggle with them.
 
Action scenes. I'm good at action scenes. Shame a novel can't be all Bam! Pow! Boom! The in-between bits are hard...

I'm good at settings, I think. I've been told my settings are vivid even though I'm a sparse describer.
 
For me, producing clear prose. Notwithstanding the fact that humour is subjective, being funny. I write dialogue well. I usually know what I'm trying to do.
 
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