Might as well play a children's card game...

[c_nordlander]

Anyone here ever have the problem with their writing that they feel they're sacrificing probability for drama, to the point where the drama actually becomes less dramatic because it's [physically, or psychologically, or otherwise] implausible?

I find I do that quite a lot in my writing: I come up with some way cool climactic scenes, and then I try to build the rest of the novel/story to lead up to them. And right now I'm having the big worry with my current novel, "The Changing of the Guard", that while the scenes are dramatic as heck, the lead-up is contrived and tortured to lead to them.

I reckon these things are usually fixed with enough hard work (i.e. thinking hard enough until I come up with a plausible reason for those immensely cool scenes). But that requires a lot of epiphanies. Well, I think this might be a useful topic for discussion...

[missy_misery]

My biggest personal struggle, writing wise, is to keep everything progressing in a reasonable, logical fashion.  I find myself skipping plot points and rushing too much, and it causes a mess.

[archonix]

Ahh... mine's adding new things. I add and add and add and each time I do it the ending gets further away. It can be very disheartening.

And the cool scene thing, too, is a big flaw of mine. I tend to put them in the middle and the work toward them, but often when I get there the plot doesn't match the scene any more and you can see the obvious join, where styles and characters have altered a little. The solution I came up with is to re-write the scenes, keeping the basic concepts intact. These days I just keep the scene in my head and write a bunch of reminder notes in the story so I can recall it when I need to.

[c_nordlander]

Ooh, that's excellent advice! Thanks a bunch!

[missy_misery]

@Graham - I tend to do the same sort of thing - I have an ending sentance and I write backwards.  This is how I end up with the true bane of my existance - tense shifts.