Your Biggest Weakness

Moving the plot along. Or even having any semblance of a plot at all. My stories are just scene after scene of idkwtf.

Transitioning between scenes.

Describing setting. It's not that I'm bad at it, I just forget. I often have to go back and add it in, which can fuck up the flow.

Dialog. I dislike having people have huge conversations, description is my thing.

I absolutely cannot do time lapses. It's also hard for me to describe how the characters go from one setting to another without having to start another chapter. I'm not sure if I should actually write them getting into a car and driving someplace or do I just jump to another setting and confuse the reader. I don't know.

^ I personally think you don't have to tell reads everything. Like, if they're going somewhere, describing the entire drive would get awkward and boring. I just place them where they have to be and the reader should be attentive enough to figure that out. But that's just me.

@ Ned Flanders
Thanks for the tip!
This is what I try to do. Occasionally, I will describe them talking in a car or something if it's an important conversation but, other than that, I usually have to keep rewriting until I get that little transition just right.

^ I usually try to think about movies and how they go from, say, their home to work. I just place them in the car and then *paragraph* someone at work saying good morning. Time elapses of longer than a few days are the ones that confuse me the most.

@ Ned Flanders
Yeah. It irks me when people write
TIME LAPSE
or
TWO HOURS LATER
it makes me think of Spongebob Squarepants.

Hahaahhahahaha same. people in here (most of them) I feel like they write out of the blue and don't even know exactly what they're doing :s

perfect disaster:

And forgetting something I wrote three chapters ago. I'm really bad at that.

ARGH THIS!!! Especially since I switch back and forth between working on multiple stories, so it's like, "That happened in this story, right?"

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I have a problem with writing short stories. I just can't do it to where I'm happy with them (or they make sense to other people), and all my ideas seem to be for stuff that's at least 10 or more chapters, if not full-on novel-ish things. Such a problem for contests xD

^ Don't get offended by this, but I think that if you have a problem with remembering what happened earlier in your story or even getting your stories mixed up with each other, you could probably solve this by keeping a plan, having some sort of organization plan. That used to happen to me when I was younger, I found it hard to keep track of my own stories. But if you have like a "masterplan" it makes it a lot easier. Grab a paper and keep track of your chapters, like chapter 1: john and anna fight about her kid. chapter 2: john leaves the home and files for divorce. chapter 3: anna refuses to sign the papers. etc. (What a weird example, lol) And I find it extremely difficult to work on multiple stories at the same time, but that's just me.

@ Ned Flanders
Oh, no offense taken at all . I do make plans and can keep up with general plot and such, but it's little details like, "Have I even talked about what my characters look like?" and such that I get confused on. I usually just go back and re-read.
But that's another one of my weaknesses is actually making an outline, because I have all these ideas for a story, I just don't know when everything is going to happen because they could really happen whenever they want to.

Yeah re-reading is actually a good idea. I have trouble reading my own things for some reason, I don't even know why xD I usually just write the whole story on Word and then divide the chapters according to the transitions of space and time and post everuthing later.

I've actually gotten better at remembering what happened, since I started thinking ahead and planning everything out. Lately my biggest weakness is figuring out how to get through the small stuff to get to the main point of the chapter/story.

This is really super-specific, but I realized it while going back to edit a couple chapters of one of my stories--I rarely, if ever, describe scent. I'm pretty decent-ish at description and including all the senses, but I actually have no sense of smell, so I never think to describe it, and when I do, it's difficult because I don't know what things smell like. The descriptions of scent I do include tend to be really vague and meaningless. I understand it's very important to include though, because scent can evoke a lot of emotion and help set the tone and atmosphere, so it's incredibly frustrating.

@ chai latte
That's something I've never even though about. I'm not good at describing scents either. It usually turns out like "The blood smelled like blood." (Not literally but, it's pretty bad.)

@ Captain Mars
xD
Yeah, I was editing a chapter of my story, and the one and only time I even mentioned scent in the whole chapter was like, "The smell was putrid". Like wow, what a vivid, captivating picture that creates. xD

@ chai latte
I'm the exact opposite My nose is incredibly hypersensitive, so for example, if I'm wearing a stronger perfume or use a body wash/lotion that has a stronger scent, it'll give me a migraine I've had to throw out sooo many lotions because in the store, they didn't smell strong, but when I actually used them, the scent drove me insane. That probably comes through in my writing

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I think my weakness is that I come across as too wordy at times. I've gotten so many comments along the lines of "you need to quit using the thesaurus, blah blah blah" when I don't even use a thesaurus. My writing is just wordy because that's how I am

I always use too many filler words. When I re-read my work, I find that I've used words like "just" and "basically" and "actually" and "sort of" so many times, and they're all words that don't really add anything to the writing itself. The other day, I re-read something I had written (it was actually a post in one of the Mibba forums, but it's still the same principal) and I had used the word "basically" three times in two sentences.

^I do the same thing – but I actually sort of love it. It's mostly intentional, though, because I think it adds something to the writing (although whether it actually does is definitely up for debate).

My biggest weakness would have to be writing actual things that make sense outside of my head and aren't alienating and don't suck.

Sex scenes.
I can't take myself seriously, and I always laugh, delete it and rewrite it. Repeat.
And realistic fic, man that's hard. I always want to make the characters have super powers.