I'm sure I have a lot but I struggle most with pacing in slow/calm scenes and dialogue. I have a bad habit of adding way to much dialogue to any given conversation, which in turn makes it last forever and the pacing suffers as a result. It takes me a while to trim down the fat from conversations and make them sound natural and smooth.
my dyslexia and my poor reading skills, I tend to leave out information by accident or wording things wrong and writing long form stories compared to shorter ones is also a problem for me. I used to make walls of text but at least that problem I fixed. At least now I'm getting people to read the story beforehand so I can get a pretty good critique.
Easily bloat. There's so much I want to put into a story that my first drafts are often WAY larger than they have any reason or right to be. I'm in the middle of a 1st draft edit and I've got to chop a 90 page script down to 45. It's a niiiightmare.
The good news is that once I have all the stuff farted onto a page it's easier to see exactly what needs fixing, cutting, or reworking. I love reworking dialogue, chopping it down to having the most impact with as few words as possible. It's a really fun challenge, and when it pays of it REALLY pays off!
My characters sound the same. The dialogue is too similar and I'm trying to work my way around it. Also I need to take better look at my grammar.
When writing out the narrative, I tend to make the storytelling sound the same for all the characters. Dialogue I have no issue with, I have no problem portraying the character's personalities through their body language and words, but setting up the scene and telling the narrative sorta comes across the same no matter which character is leading it. I dunno, maybe I'm making a bigger deal out of it than I should be but I feel like conveying personality through the narrative is just as important as conveying personality through the character's reactions and words.
I struggle to keep things simple and often substitute dialogue for a panel which means everything takes much longer to get through. For example fight scenes do so much 'show don't tell' that they're ridiculously long. Chapter one of West will be around 100 pages in itself because I'm not very good at trimming back the flow.
Transitions between scenes. I like absolutely always rush them, gotta get better at it. But I'm glad so see some other people on the same boat with me! We got this!
I feel like I'm going too slow in the set-up of my story, but it's all so things make sense later, so I don't have to do a bunch of boring, forced exposition. I'm just worried people are gonna lose interest before I get to the real meaty part of the story. I also worry that I hint too much at things and don't explain enough, that I'm weaving back and forth over the line of intriguing amounts of mystery and not enough info, so it's confusing. I forget that my audience doesn't know the whole story and I do, so I have to really focus on how I explain or reveal things, making sure It's thoroughly enough explained, without ruining any surprises for later on.
I have that big weakness too especially my drawings. but either way i am enjoy writing even it's frustrating to work my grammar better. I really hope i can do better in future. ^_^
Definitely my dialogue and pacing, my lines are either chessy or out of place and my pacing is usually too slow I feel. But I feel like if I speed it up I'll skip important stuff so...
I'm immediately zoomed into this weakness because I feel like when it comes to writing, I take things cosmically slow. I put a micro-lens to the situation, to the characters, to the bloody number of times somebody blinks while I create tension and symbolism in a moment. I have such a hard time letting scenes actually play out because I obsess over the details of a dramatic situation.
Everything in a room, every pose of the figure, the lighting, all must be emphasised over 20 pages so that ONE LITTLE EXCHANGE can be completely, psychologically, biologically sound. It's a venomous weakness and I think it came from an unreciprocated love with math and science.
Hm i think trying to keep things from being repetitive?? when i was editing my thumbnails i realized that a lot of scenes...were really redundant, and so i had to cut them out :'0 Also idk keeping characterization consistent ahahaa
I write too much. Fortunately, I am able to condense my words when I get to the dialogue part of a new page I'm working on for my comic.
Oh absolutely, I have so many notes and I'm constantly adding more.
I write notes in my phone when I'm out so I don't forget things;
I'm wondering if being overly obsessive about it could be a fault too.
i think i got 2 big ones.
1: im really bad at making really hate-able characters. like on purpose hate-able characters. i probably got loads that i meant to be likeable but the reader is just sittin there like ok but when she gunna get hit by a truck please. i cant make the ones that people love hating like professor umbridge from harry potter
2: i want my characters to have different types of humor but i can never pull it off right and it just seems awkward when i try
For me it's not showing personality in my characters. I feel Simon Nero is so plot based that it seems it's gonna be either awkward or hard to introduce some of a character's personality(i.e. weaknesses, fears, etc).
None because I'm a literary Superman!
. . . Okay, just kidding. My problems are more related to my tendency to indulge in using difficult words and flowery language, which takes out the impact from tense action scenes. On the other hand I can sometimes overdo it and write everything in a very technical manner.
I have this exact problem. :'D
It was super apparent in the beginning because I was really rusty with writing on top of everything else. But the method you mentioned has helped me too a lot with pacing. I still encounter thumbnailed pages that I can easily merge into one page. Which makes me very grateful to past me for having almost a year's worth of thumbnails to fiddle with.
