I Don’t Want To Write

Oh, I still want to create worlds and characters and bring them to life and share their stories.  I love doing that.

But I hate writing.

There, I said it.

I hate writing.

What I really want is for the stories in my head to appear on the screen in front of me, exactly as they play out in my mind, without me having to do the actual writing.

For one thing, I can’t type fast enough to keep up with the flow of ideas.  Plus, typing takes too long. I want them done now.

But the main thing is that what I type never matches what I see in my mind.

And a lot of that is because I don’t do a good job of setting a scene. I need to work more on describing the setting, of showing where my characters are and letting the reader see what they are seeing.  Description really isn’t my forte, but it’s something that I know I need to work on so I do make a conscious effort to include more of it, at least in the rewrites. (First drafts, not so much.  I actually left myself a note in one that says “Where are they having this conversation? Setting, please!”)

A friend who beta read my first (published) novel, Song and Sword, was the first to point that out to me.  He said something along the lines of, “Now, don’t go all Tolkien on me and spend three pages describing the mountain, but give me more than talking heads.”

And that’s another part of the problem.  I see the scenes play out in my mind like I’m watching a movie and I want to include everything that I see, including the sky and clouds and grass and backdrop and…

And if I put all of that in it would take me a thousand words just to do a single paragraph and the story would never move forward.

I know there’s a happy medium there somewhere, but it’s really hard for me to find.