When the going gets tough

The tough go shopping.

Or something.

Generally, things that are easy for me to write include: dialogue, description, one-liners, adorable children and descriptions of people talking to adorable children, wittily, about tea.

And redundancy.

Things that are hard for me to write include: plot, strong emotions, and flaws.

I am getting much better at flawing people, by the way. But it's sometimes hard to resist my urge to think that my characters must be PERFECT and BRILLIANT, because obviously, I would like to present that way to the world, myself, if I had a choice.

But I've had a general rule that if I find myself butting up against something and saying "but I dun waaaaanna", it's a pretty fair assumption that it's an important thing to work on.

So I've been butting up against what happens next in my book for weeks now. It's boring, I don't want to write it, it involves a lot of research, the more I think about it, the more I'm not sure I want so much of the focus to be on that aspect of the plot, etc.. And I know that most of those things are excuses for this thing that, for some reason, I just really don't want to write. So I assumed that it had to be Important To Work On, both for my development as a writer, and for the plot.

Turns out I woke up this morning with the realisation that the reason I hadn't been wanting to write it is that it just doesn't work. It does detract from the story. It is kind of pointless, there are BETTER ways around it which build up characters that are otherwise 2-dimensional! I can make it much more realistic. AND I don't have to betray a character's beliefs to get him into a situation he would never chose to go into.

Sometimes, I guess, when you can't make yourself write something? It's because you shouldn't be writing it.