Writing isn’t like driving or cooking. Not for me. It seems to only get harder as the years pass. I don’t mean making up stories to tell, I mean the craft side of it.

I’m trying to tell a story.

A story is a plot, a series of events.

It should be simple enough to write it, but it isn’t. Not anymore. Maybe the problem is having too many options, or perhaps it’s an excuse not to write. But what I’m learning is that there’s no such thing as simply telling a story. I have to know how to tell it.

My first mistake, it seems, was picking the wrong main character. Events are facts, but those facts are seen from a certain viewpoint.  Originally, my main character was the murderer, but how can the events be a murder mystery to the killer? They know who dun it. Not a lot of mystery there.

So I got a better main character. But I’m still working on their compelling reason to figure out who the real murderer is. I hope that will come out as I write and I can fix it in the rewrite. For now, it’s a bit nebulous and nebulous leads to weak writing, so I’m not happy with that.

My second mistake is my always mistake, meaning I make this same mistake every time so you’d think I’d know better by now but apparently I don’t. And that mistake is: I start way too far back and take a long lope toward the inciting incident. I’m trying to put that inciting incident closer to the beginning, like in the first chapter.

It used to be that I could just sit down and write. I miss those days, although I suspect I’m a much better writer now. But why is it that every other craft seems to get easier with practice while writing just gets more difficult? It’s my inner critic, I know. I want to write well. I can’t figure out how to balance that painstaking and time-consuming drive with the pressure to spin out work as fast as I can.

I have no answers here. What is like for you? Is it getting harder?

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LATE ADDITION that has nothing to do with my post, but have you seen this visual associative thesaurus? So cool!