I can't quite bring myself to create a happy, normal ending to any story. It just seems so cliche and cheesy that I find myself killing scores of characters off just to feel that I made the "right" ending work.
Dialogue, actually. I try to keep it out of my stories as much as possible... I have a big problem deciding between writing what my character would actually say versus writing what my character should say to keep the audience interested. I like to keep my pieces as 'real' as possible, and so that means real dialogue. But what people really say usually does not work in a story, in which dialogue should be much more precise.
I'm the exact other way around: I don't like to kill any characters at all, even the villains. And I would shoot myself in the foot sooner then write an unhappy ending. I don't actually consider it a problem per se, but it does make it tricky to write engaging and suspenseful stories. >>
For writing in general.... Short stories. Specifically writing within a word limit. I can't do it even if someone paid me a thousand dollars. Seriously, in 9th grade my English teacher gave us the assignment to write a short story about whatever we wanted but it had to be 2 pages max. Everyone in my class wrote 1-2 pages, I wrote 17 pages. Yeah... Same with my English teacher last year (in 11th grade). He gave us an essay assignment and the maximum word count we could have was about 800 words (I think... might've been a little more) and the subject was our view of Heaven or Hell. My essay ended up being 8 pages long... It's seriously impossible for me to write something short X___X.
I experienced someting similar tot his. Well not as extreme. We would have these small writing assignments. I would write a load more then any of my classmates. Sometimes others would find out and they would tease me, in a friendly way, about how I was a suck up.
@Unit: It was the opposite for me, lol. People would see how much I wrote and then ask me all confused "How can you WRITE that much?!". This, of course, came from the majority of people who think writing a paragraph is an arduous task.
Actually thats very much similar. Though even my writing assignments were never nearly as long as yours
Do you mean Achilles' heel? Anyway, mine is action scenes. I try to write a fight scene, and it's not popping the way I'd like it to.
@Anders: They are. I had to fight my 11th grade English teacher about my essay cause he kept telling me that the word limit was there to simplify the grading process and that I should shorten it. But I told him if I shortened it any more than I already had that it would be the equivalent of crap (but I guess that's what he wanted to read >_>). In the end, my mom and I had to work all night to shorten mine to a more "acceptable" length and I turned that one in. I still aced it, but I insisted that he read the original long one too. Which he did, so yay! @Unit: Somehow no one my age can write as much as me. Not even the other advid writers in my grade. I just can't help it, anything I write becomes magically really long.
I don't mean to burst your bubble, but the inability to write within guidelines is nothing to brag about...at high school, you might be able to get away with it if your teachers are lenient, but once you reach tertiary level, you are harshly penalised for writing over the word limits. In most cases, they won't even bother reading the excess. So, while you can, I'd work on getting that under control....
