How hard is it to write?

The perception may come from the mental aspects of it, such as world building and descriptions, that sort of thing and not the actual physical act of writing. Maybe it comes from the pressure people but on themselves to achieve a high goal or they compare themselves to other people's work. Some people are easily distracted. Perceptions can come in a ton of different forms.

For some it could be language barrier if they are trying to write in a language that is not native to them.

This is more of what you are looking for?

I'd try to answer this, but I'm not sure I know to do so without derailing from the type of answer you're looking for?? I think a big issue here is the combination of not being clear with what answer you want, and not phrasing the question correctly. It's too simply worded and open-ended to answer, like "how hard is it to write?" could mean a number of things alone without the context you're trying to give people to properly answer it the way you want it answered.

First things first, what do you define as writing? People are going off on the different parts of writing, such as plotting, dialogue, world-building, the word usage, there's too many aspects of it to just generalize it for a question when you're looking for something specific.

Secondly, hard is a subjective word, and the range of difficulty varies from person to person. But hell, the word difficulty can be based on different things as well, like all the different sections I mentioned earlier, these are things people can have an easy or hard time with, whatever that means here. Do you mean to ask how long the process takes as a result of personal nitpicking and editing, or lack of creativity to come up with something, or time span of which you do all these things.. again, this is so open to a number of answers.

Side note that relates to what I'm saying about you leaving questions open-ended, the author 1 and 2 example you gave. If you don't give enough context, people are gonna fill in the blanks with what they think you're trying to get at, dude.

You keep saying that you don't get how we're seeing, then let's try this instead for a second, how would you answer this question and how would you interpret the author example had it came from someone else? And to make things easier on everyone else here, what would you define as easy in this scenario? Would you consider writing the way that you do it as a hobby, a passion, or a job? I'm hoping the answers to these will help us all see where your head's at with all this so we can answer the original question and any tangents on the subject better.

Here's my take on it:

Writing is easy. Good writing is hard.

Anyone can sit down and come up with a plot, characters, and write a hundred pages about it, but the difference is in how much energy and passion the writer focuses on the work. I used to think that writing was easy, and that was because ideas came to me naturally, but like when a person starts drawing, they're always going to improve. There is always room for growth! I've been dreaming about writing my whole life, actually writing for seventeen years, and seriously writing for the last five.

Hell, I look back on things I wrote barely a year ago, and they're just bad, bad, bad.

General rule of thumb: any book that was ever enjoyed had to be conceived, written, looked over, edited, perfected. Then the length cut in half and the process repeated.

There are many little nuances that go into writing, like styles of point of view, tense, if the author switches between characters or not, foreshadowing, symbolism, long nights staring at thesauruses, agonizing over if the alliteration should be put in or avoided, making sure you don't use the same word twice in the same paragraph, running out of words and thinking of a completely new way to describe the color of your characters eyes besides the word "blue", etc, etc, etc.

If you care about what you're writing, then writing is never easy.

Mental aspects aside, it takes quite a toll, physically, as well! As a writer, myself, I probably sit at a desk and work for about five hours a day. My back hurts from not sitting in my chair properly, my neck hurts from looking between the keyboard and the monitor, I live a sedentary lifestyle because of my passion and have to make time to move around lest I risk blood clots.

As for hiring different people to write different characters! It's only a waste of resources if the writer is bad lmao

For example, I'm writing a fanfic with my friend at the moment, and while we are writing it word by word and line by line together, when it comes to the interactions of the characters, my personal writing style better fits the voice of one character, and my friend's is suited to the other. Together it makes for a more organic, authentic experience.

ALSO speed NEVER equals quality!

You can be speedy and write well, but it is r a r e

But that's my opinion!

For me, writing in the my native language is easy - at least, if talking about short stories. I'm just putting story which is already in my head, into words, and it subjectively feels as something natural, because the process of thinking itself uses speech. So, if I'm feeling enough inspiration, I usually easily catch the flow when doing it, and feel not much tension. Writing in english, of course, requires more effort (and gives much more mistakes as well ).
But what is really hard is to write a good story. Too bad I don't know anything about how to write stories which will please not only me, but the readers too
Long stories are more hard for me than short ones, as well.

Writing is hard or to put it clearly....good writing is hard.
I'm a fast typer, I learned when I wanted to be a scribe. I write in all aspects of my life from my novel/script for a comic, at work or at uni. I guess my point is: the speed in which words are put down does nothing to show "good" writing or a "good" writer it's the quality of the words and what they tell.
I also have physical problems with my wrists so typing fast for long periods of time or just typing in general causes pain-- that also needs to be taken into consideration and it makes it difficult to write.
Putting down ideas, simple plots, outlines can be quick and easy for some-- but to turn that into a readable story, with good grammar, no plot holes, flowing dialogue, no excessive use of description or too little of it...that's hard.
I find writing a challenge buts it's an enjoyable experience.....and it's hard
Just bc I love something doesn't make it easy, it makes it worth it and that's the feeling I get.

I just addressed the question with my own opinion and experiences. I hope I answered it

There is no such thing as good writing. It doesn't exist. There is only good rewriting. Iteration makes writing good. Nothing that comes straight out of your head is actually good quality.

I'm being hyperbolic, but the sentiment is true.

To me it seems more that you keep making open ended discussion topics on a forum, expecting people to answer your open question the way you want in the way you perceive it, and getting upset/defensive when people decide to interpret the question how they want and have an actual open discussion about the topic. You then harp on specifics that you feel they misinterpreted... meanwhile you have misleading titles, and are not clear from the start what you really want from your posts.

I adore writing and I take it very seriously, but it will always be a hobby and a form of catharsis for me rather than something I try to do as a living because it's just simply not viable to rely on a career as uncertain as creative writing. But, since I don't do it for a living, I think that's the biggest thing that factors into it being easy and fun for me. I think that, for people who do it for a living, it is probably FAR more stressful.

I write pretty slow, I think, even though I do write every day. I think the reason why I write pretty slow is that I really try my best to be descriptive and artistic when I write--even though I'm not all that good at it. Another thing about writing is the misconception that writing long-form stories like novels is really easy. It isn't. It is far more stressful and at times frustrating than writing a little short story. I actually really needed a break from writing my novel so last night I had a blast switching over to writing a short story about an android and a Preacher and I think I wrote like 1000 words in two hours! Not bad <3 I do usually do a lot of editing as I go, too, which probably is what takes the most time and effort when writing.

My advice to new writers is always to at least try and start out writing short stories because they really are a blast and a ton of fun to write and they really do help you develop your craft. Getting words on a page is easy, making them pretty words is difficult. This is why, once again, short stories are so much easier to write than novels. Because they're shorter, it is a lot easier to be more artful with them.

But really, I think how hard writing is varies from person-to-person. One of my sisters literally described it as agony as she looks at a blank word page and ponders what to write while sweating buckets haha. Meanwhile for me, it is literally one of my coping skills.

I have read and I guess we can agree to disagree? I still stand by my previous comment. You have misleading titles and your threads come off as if you want a discussion but your replies to people come off as if you don't.

It may have something to do with this being a forum and the goal of forums is to discuss... or it may have to do with that one thread where you wanted people to give you replies to your thread... (I'm summarizing my memory of this so it may not be exact) but essentially complained about how there wasn't enough activity in your threads, I guess that just lead me to believe you wanted discussion in your threads rather than straight up answers?

And you may think your misleading titles are the least important part... but to me they are the biggest problem. You don't want people to assume things with you but you purposely misrepresent you threads with a misleading title... like yes that is your right, but stop getting pissed at people because of it.

I'm not familiar with that topic so I can't comment on that title. To me it's really unclear what it's about which is why I probably never read it in the first place if I even saw it.

Well I'm trying my darnest to explain my understanding of all this? I dunno maybe it's not helping. But tbh I've read a lot of the replies in this thread and I'm still not really sure what you're looking for out of the thread itself. I thought I understood with the first post, but with every new reply I get more and more confused to the point where I'm not really sure what I should be asking to clarify.

Nobody ignored everything you wrote, most people here read the whole topic but writing a question in the title keeps it in their mind, people THINK that's the answer you want. Reading your topic I also assumed you wanted an answer to the question. It doesn't mean you should title it blandly it means don't pose a question if you're not looking for answers on that question.

The reason I find this confusing is because I think most people who replied to this thread gave valid answers to this.

For me the reason I perceive writing as a difficult task is because I'm a perfectionist and I rewrite things a lot. It's not that I don't enjoy it, enjoyment isn't the only think that makes something difficult to do, but overthinking everything is a little exhausting. Writing several scenarios for one scene isn't difficult, the difficult part is deciding which one fits the story better.

For me, it totally depens on what I'm writing. When I'm writing on short novels, as soon as I settle with my idea, I can write it fast and easily.
But I work on my bigger projects, heavy with work building, writing a single page can be hard and laborious, because it must be in the same tone as the rest and not have contradictory informations. Every sentence can contain a detail that must be checked.
On the former exemple, my writing is totally free, without constraint. It's easy and enjoyable to write.
On the latter, I have "rules" to follow. It's hard and hair-pulling.