What so you struggle with most on your writing? For me it is the issue of wordings and comma usage. I have a hard time with both of these areas. I have to learn to say things with the least amount of words as possible.

I have a hard time figuring out where a story is going.  I get started, think I have something interesting and then I get stuck trying to come up with a decent plot, something that sounds like an actual novel rather than written out documentary on the characters' lives.

I have not written a fiction story since I was in school because I get lost trying to figure out what the characters are going to do and how to tie the whole thing together. I have a lot of respect for those who write fiction works.

I like to write about real life and so that is why I am excited about the Washington book I am working on. I don't have much content written at all, but I am taking lots of notes and hoping to get it up and running very soon.

The hardest part of writing for me is the loss of imagination and having to put the entire story together. I know how it should start but the middle and conclusion lack substance which causes me to start the entire project all over again.

That hardest part for me is to actually start.

Burn out, time, and memory ha ha.

Also starting, like Djeinus says!

It's a tie between dedicating creative time to creating and leaving evaluation for later...and keeping evaluation more constructive than, "Scrap the whole thing!" I count all that as one problem, because it's basically remembering that I can't create and evaluate at the same time.

The second thing that is also the hardest part, is figuring out a climax and resolution. My mind just loves to inspire me with beginning scenes. I'm often quite pleased with my first 3,500 words, even when I read it over in my "editor" mindset. And I wrangle some characters and settings well enough. But I have such a difficult time getting something done and finished, or even keeping that inspiration and self-confidence (or muse-confidence) past the 5,000-word mark.

For me the hardest part is forcing myself to sit and write. In high school the in-class essays were fun because ideas popped into my head. Now, unless inspiration strikes, writing feels like a chore. I'd love to be disciplined enough to write daily. Am I not passionate enough about writing? I used to be. All through school my teachers loved my essays and poems, but writing a novel or even a short story is daunting. What can I write that's worth reading? I want my stories to touch people's lives, but maybe the problem is I'm too afraid to dig that deep and feel whatever it is I need to feel in order to write the stories I need to write. I know something's trapped deep inside, but I do not know how to express it.

I go through days in which I have no inspiration either. What I found to be helpful was to write down a list of titles when I am having an especially good day so that I have something to work on when there is nothing creative coming to my mind. I write a ton of articles and you would think that I would eventually run out of ideas, but they keep coming to me and I just jot them down. Right now my running list is at 10 articles and I might not even get through all of them before I think of something new to write about. I am also going to be starting to write my book sometime in the near future so it will help bring some more inspiration to me I hope.

Finding the time to write. Like most of us I am way to tired to write because of everything I have to do through out the day.

I was hoping that the new year would give me more time to write, bit I am finding that I have less time. I am focusing my attention on getting the house in order and hopefully by February I will have more time available.

The hardest part of writing for me is trying to form my thoughts in proper order. I have a scratch pad that I write notes in. I go over it everyday. When a thought strikes me, I try to piece some of my other thoughts together and try to write something from that. Sometimes none of my notes fit, but my mind is still buzzing with an idea, so I take another notebook and write my thoughts in there and hopefully get some sort of idea to continue with whatever I want to write. But I always, always keep my thoughts written down so I don't forget anything.

The hardest part is getting it written down when the ideas start pouring in. I tend to find myself occupied with something like driving and all of a sudden I get a thought that is so moving, but I can't stop to write it down.

I tend to have the opposite problem of a lot of people here - I have trouble narrowing it down and not going all over the place.  Meaning, I have 100 things I want to write about and when I pick one I start to get frustrated that it is going to take forever to get to the other cool things on the list I may never get too!  My mind works too hard, too quickly, so my challenge is to just calm down and focus, kidding myself into thinking that it is OK to just write the current work and never get to all the others.  I can rarely trick myself, is the problem.

The thing that's getting my goat at present (and I can assure you that my goat is looking more and more peeved by the minute) is spending my time doing research when I really want to get on and write something.

It's my own stupid fault, really. I was the one that chose to write a novel based around the period of the Irish War of Independence. It seemed like a good idea at the time, but now I'm finding myself looking up dates and events to make sure that I'm getting everything in the right place and order. As I've discovered, you can spend half an hour or longer researching something that is going to take up one sentence.

Duck you might find it best to write down all the dates and events in order, then you don't have to google and can just look at your reference paper .

That's what I do for events in my book.

I did that, at least to some extent, but so many things happened during that period that it's impossible to cover everything. Sometimes, it might be one particular speech that someone made or one raid on a barracks or something like that.

I fear that if I wrote down every event, I'd end end writing a history book as well...hmm, now there's an idea.

Someone here mentioned that the hardest part from them is to actually start writing!It is the same for me, so I pretty much understand their point.

The hardest part for me is to sit down and write that one word, the first one that will start the creative imagination and lead the whole story step by step towards that last word.

Also, what really bugs me is a writer's block; that one moment when I have a blockage in my mind and the whole idea about where to go next is gone.

Yeah, for me too. I always find something to do when I sit down to start writing a piece. This even happened to me when I worked at a newspaper and had to do it fast. It always took too long to actually begin writing.

I write in chunks, which means I work from a very thorough outline and I fill in the blanks in a non-chronological order. It's a system that works for me, but it does create the problem of saving the least interesting parts of the book for last. I naturally want to work on the exciting sections first (the fights, the climax, the opening scenes), so when I'm only a few days away from finishing my novel, I just have the in-between stuff to finish. At that point, I really start losing motivation. That's my biggest problem. I'm so close to the finish line, but it's really difficult to make that last push.

CharliePurcell86 (02:12am Sun, Nov 22, 2015)

I write in chunks, which means I work from a very thorough outline and I fill in the blanks in a non-chronological order. It's a system that works for me, but it does create the problem of saving the least interesting parts of the book for last. I naturally want to work on the exciting sections first (the fights, the climax, the opening scenes), so when I'm only a few days away from finishing my novel, I just have the in-between stuff to finish. At that point, I really start losing motivation. That's my biggest problem. I'm so close to the finish line, but it's really difficult to make that last push.

So true! The exact same thing happens to me. I dread that last part where all the "filling holes" job comes. Fortunately, sometimes I find that once I've started, I actually find ways to make those "filler" parts more interesting than I had thought.