Beginnings And Endings
I often find that when I start a new story, I have a hard time writing the beginning. Everything seems to go by painstakingly slow, like rusted gears in an old clock. Nothing seems interesting or fun or entertaining or whatever until I get past the first few paragraphs.
Fortunately, I never give up, even if the beginning is boring, but I know that it will eventually pick up sometime and it always does. The beginning still isn't that good, but I can always edit or revise it later (which I do, of course).
Now the middle of the story, that's almost always the easist part for me to write. Sometimes I get stuck in the mud, but it always interests me. Possibly because in the middle of the story I now know my characters, the location, plot, etc better than when I started, making it much easier to drive conflict between the characters and the enviornment and such because I know it so well and am familiar with it.
I also tend to have an easier time writing a series with characters that I am familiar with, although even those can suffer from having hard to write beginnings as well.
And then there comes a time when I have to end the story, which can also be hard, but in a different way than beginnings. While my beginnings tend to start out slower, my endings tend to keep trying to go on because I start to unconsciously add more and more stuff to the ending that just seems plain unnecessary to me at the time but at the same time I realize if I delete it that it the ending will just feel rushed and badly written. This doesn't affect me as much with short stories, but with epics/novels this can annoy me.
Ironically, later on, when I am in the editing stage, the endings turn out much better than I thought at the time (although of course I still edit it because no ending is perfect the first time written).
However, I have discovered that when I go ahead and rewrite a story for its second draft, its beginning and endings tend to be much more natural and interesting for me, probably because I know where I want the story to go and so it gives me the will to continue writing and I know when to naturally end it.
I have been using this technique - writing the first draft from scratch, then deleting it and rewriting it in its second draft - for my yet-to-be-posted Glatorian Chronicles #4: The Fallen Warrior and An Unlikely Alliance, the latter of which I am still in the process of rewriting, and it has worked incredibly well. Methinks this will be my main technique when editing short stories and epics from now on, mostly because I enjoy rewriting my stories a lot.
So, to my fellow writers out there, I pose these questions to you:
1) What's easiest for you to write: Beginnings, middles, or endings?
1a) Why is the one you chose easiet to write?
2) What's the hardest part for you to write: Beginnings, middles, or endings?
2a) Why is the one you chose hardest to write?
Hopefully your answers will generate some interesting comments in the comments section below .
-TNTOS-
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