Friday 14 November 2008

Friday's Five Things that... are harder to write than I expected

Okay, here's a question for you all - have you ever sat down to write a story and then ended up just sitting there staring off into space or scratching your head. These are five of the stories that I expected to find far easier to write then I do.

1. Sweet Romances. I've looked back over the writing I've done for the last few years, and I've realised that two of the ones I lost interested in and didn't finsh were the ones where the characters were too sweet. Don't get me wrong, I like the characters, I even liked the plots, I jus didn't have this desire to know what would happen next. There was no spark to them.

2. Vanilla. Other people seem to be able to write it no problem, I'm starting to realise I'm just not wired up to wirte about sex that doesn't have some sort of kink in it. It doesn't always have to be much, a bit of power play, a pair of hnadcuffs and I'm fine. It doesn't even have to look like kink - everything that's kinky about it can happen inside a character's head and that's fine with me. The kink just has to be there somewhere.

3. MFM. I write about men and women having sex all the time. Writing about one woman having sex with two straight men should be easy, right? Wrong. I have two main problems with this little subgenre. First of all - the two guys keep guying each other up - I write a lot of male/male. If there's three people in the bed, it does seem a waste not to let all of them play with both the other people in the bed. Secondly - my guys tend to be possessive - why are they inviting another man into their bed to have sex with a woman they feel possessive over? I've just finished writing a MFM and I'm about to start editing it. And I'll admit I have struggled with the psycholoy. In the end the only way I could make it work was to go down the paranormal route. I think it works now. I'm keeping my fingers crossed I still think that once I've started editing it.

4. Historical. Believe it or not, when I started writing, I was all about sweet Regency Romances. I even wrote a whole 80k first draft. The thing is - research. I never feel like I've done enough. 20 books on the Regency period later, and at least quadripple that number of websites, and I never felt like I even scratched the surface. I've come to the conclusion that I'm better off writing psydo-history/fantasy for those plots and characters who aren't happy living in the hear and now.

5. Short Stories. This one has been annoying me a little bit lately. I decided a while ago that I was going to post up a free little short story - maybe 1-2k every Friday. Should be easy right? I got a few ideas together and... suddenly I didn't have 4 short story plots, I have four novella plots. So, I told myself, okay. I'll write a free story to go up on TEB's free story section. That could be longer - maybe 3-5k. A little bit of thinking about it later, my list of novella plots has grown a bit more and I'm still without a short story to my name. Maybe I'm just not a short story writer and that's that. I always want a context around what happens, I want more to happen for the characters than I can fit into a short story.

Okay guys, so what do you find harder about writing or to write than you thought you would when you started writing? Any takers?

.....

Other news:

A model submissive - my nano project - is coming along nicely. I'm on 21,500 words so far, so it's about on target. I'll be passing the half way mark on the weekend.

My secondary writing project - In the heat of the moment - was going to head for an anthology call, but it's going off in an unexpected direction, so it's probably going to end up as a stand alone and not a anthology sub at all.

Editing - I'm taking the weekend off editing. On Monday I'm going to attack Between Tooth and Paw with the intention of subbing it at the end of the month.

And that's it. Take care all.

3 comments:

Bronwyn Green said...

In answer to your question, all the freaking time.

I always thought I'd write historicals...medievals, to be exact, but everytime I sit down to do one I'm overwhelmed by the research.

I have managed a time-travel medieval and a sort of fantasy-esque medieval, but to be honest, they practically killed me.

I also have trouble with romances with no paranormal elements. I like to read them, but I have such a hard time writing them. I managed one, and it turned out well, but it was really tough.

Michelle said...

Blurbs and Bios.

Kim Dare said...

I really wish blogger would stop eating my replies *sigh*

Bronwyn - I'm sort of the reverse, I like reading paranormals, but I find them much harder to write then I expected - too many decisions to make about just how their paranormal elements can work and I'm easily confused.

Chelle - they do get easier with practice - just push through the first few and you'll be fine :)