What is "hard to write"?

[seawasp]

 
Obviously, for those who don't like writing, almost anything is hard to write, but the question I'm looking at here is "if you're the kind of person who writes stories, what's hard to write?"

To further narrow it down, we'll skip the "this genre which I just don't see myself ever writing" -- if you don't like romances or mil-SF or documentaries about carnivorous marsupials, we'll stipulate that anyone would find it hard to write. Not impossible, especially with a large enough payout in the offing, but not pleasant, a chore, and probably a difficult one. 

So. After thinking about this and my own experiences, there's actually multiple answers, because "hard to write" can encompass several different kinds of difficulty. 

Princess Holy Aura is one of the most challenging books I've ever written. Not because I didn't WANT to write it -- I did. Not because the subject material was unfamiliar, because it wasn't. It was hard to write because it was a literary MINEFIELD. The basic concept's twitchy enough -- 35 year old man gets selected to be the Mahou Shoujo Senshi (Magical Girl Warrior) Princess Holy Aura. But because I was following this concept not for cheap laughs but as a serious (mostly) exploration of the concept of the magical girl and the ethical/moral choices involved in their existence, this ran me headlong into multiple other really very dangerous areas. My main character, Steve Russ, AKA Princess Holy Aura, AKA Holly Owen, has to deal with some severe personality issues, some stupendous body dysmorphia -- in both directions, mind -- and social issues from going from a 35 year old, quite large and powerful man to a 14 year old pretty high-school girl. More, as Holly, she has to negotiate the social world of high school and find friends -- and ultimately teammates. 

This is obviously conceptual dynamite; how do I make the reader believe in, and accept, the transition of "overweight nerd 35 year old man" to "14 year old girl", and then have that girl associate with other 14 year old girls without all sorts of icky possible interactions? Moreover, leaving aside the reader's reactions, what about the characters in the book? It'd be cheating to keep that fact a secret, and in fact one of the other areas I was exploring was, as Seika Cooper/Radiance Blaze puts it, "punching the bad memes in the face"; in particular, the idea of recruiting teenage girls to fight world-threatening menaces without even letting the parents and guardians of those girls KNOW was one of the ones I wanted to punch hard. 

But that of course meant that I'd have the fathers and mothers of four teenage girls discovering that the fifth teenage girl... had a very different origin and background, one that might require legal, or even violent, response in  most cases. 

But wait! There's more! Unlike the shonen (boys') fighter series (Dragonball, One Piece, Naruto, etc.), the shoujo (girls') magical warrior series are focused at least as much around the personal interactions as they are around the fight of the week; indeed, the fights are often more ways of introducing new characters or of playing out particular personal conflicts in a larger than life fashion. Nowhere is this more prominent than in personal relationships such as dating, which gets to have a layer of potential tension from the magical warrior side in addition to all the usual stumbling blocks teenagers encounter. 

The mahou shoujo genre often has a spear counterpart to the main heroine who has a potential romantic interaction, as well, and I didn't neglect this. But there we get into yet another touchy subject -- as now we have the ex-35 year old man-turned-teen-girl having romantic attraction to a teenage boy. 

Because of all these elements, and a few others, writing Princess Holy Aura was, while fun, also incredibly difficult, nerve-wracking, as I tried to tapdance through this minefield, filled with potential Bad Stuff in multiple areas -- age gaps, honesty in relationships, trans issues (or is it even trans?), body dysmorphia, straight and gay sexual issues, and more. To my great relief, most readers seemed to think I negotiated these dangers pretty well, but it was neither easy nor straightforward work.


On a completely different level, Boundary, and to some extent its sequels, was at least as hard to write. In this case, the reasons were probably a bit easier to understand -- and for some people, wouldn't even be an issue. 

The simple fact is that until Boundary, I had NEVER seriously considered writing "hard SF" novels. Hard SF, which is built firmly on the foundation of Real Science (and often spends time Showing The Work), is one of the most demanding subgenres to write for the simple reason that OTHER people can CHECK your work. While there is a lot of effort involved in making a fantasy world magical system that's coherent, there's no one on Earth who can tell me, for instance, that "magic doesn't work that way" in my own stories. 

In hard SF, you will encounter one of the most demanding and nitpicking fandom groups ever, who have calculators and reference books (or websites) to hand, sometimes at the same time they're reading the book. They'll let you know if you get the partial pressure of oxygen on Everest wrong, they'll catch that handwave you did to avoid actually calculating how much time it would take to boil an ocean, and so on. The damned "real world" and "science" is always there to spoil your storytelling fun. 

For Boundary, I had two other challenges to deal with. The first was that this was to be a collaboration, with a far more successful author (Eric Flint), and I had no real idea how that would work for a full scale hard-SF novel (we'd done a sort-of collaboration on Diamonds Are Forever). The second was that the idea that became Boundary was Eric's -- a story he'd tried to write TWICE before, and failed. That was a hell of a burden to carry -- the idea that I might be able to pull off a story that had stopped him both times. 

Boundary took me on a journey of research that involved multiple scientists, including JPL literal rocket scientists who'd worked on NERVA, astronomers who were experts on Mars, paleontology professors, and much more. And then I had to weave together all the science to give us a believable adventure, in which the true adversary wasn't any person -- but instead was the uncaring, and unforgiving, nature of space itself. I was, honestly speaking, terrified when I started working on Boundary. 

As things turned out, Boundary did come out well -- enough to warrant two direct sequels, and a follow-on trilogy in the form of Castaway Planet and sequels.

Speaking of sequels, another of my benchmarks of "hard to write" can be found in Spheres of Influence, the second in the Arenaverse series. Here the challenge certainly wasn't physics, which I was sort of waving cheerily at as i shouted "SUFFICIENTLY ADVANCED" while driving by.  It also wasn't any major conceptual dynamite, either. 

No, for Spheres of Influence the challenge came from Grand Central Arena, its predecessor and -- still to this day -- my best selling single novel. While I've never hit the NYT bestseller lists, GCA had made a noticeable splash compared to others, and I was extremely proud of the universe I'd created in that book. I thought I'd written a pretty darn good book with some of the neatest ideas I'd yet published. 

Which meant that now I had to make a SECOND book that would live up to the first. I was already painfully aware that this was going to be a major challenge, for the simple reason that the FIRST book has an almost insuperable advantage: it's the book that gets to introduce all the coolest stuff. The strange future world of Earth's system in 2375, the discovery of the Arena, the first encounters with aliens, all of this awesome material had already been presented dramatically to the reader. Even if they still thought it was cool... would it be cool ENOUGH to bring people back for a second reading? In the second book, I'd be having to address problems set up earlier, or else I'd have to find a way to expand on the universe enough to add brand new "cool" elements -- but if I did that, I was potentially setting myself up for even larger problems in the third book!

For Spheres, I did some of both -- expanding our knowledge of the Hyperion project with the introduction of Sun Wu Kung and the first mentions of Maria-Susanna, addressing some of the political implications of the way in which the Arenaverse operated, and of course finding a way to put our heroes back into active danger so the whole book wasn't a bunch of talking heads. It was, ultimately, successful -- but I had been, once more, biting my nails the whole time, and then some time afterward until I saw audience reactions.

A final "that was hard to write" category is one that I am both sad and thankful that I'll never have to directly revisit: Fenrir. Eric and I had contracted to do Fenrir several years before, and though we'd started work on it a couple of times, his schedule was becoming more and more hectic, and so there was a long gap from the initial work until I got to the point where I was really ready to try to finish it. Eric and I discussed it more, and then COVID hit -- and hit me hard. It took me many months to recover from that, and catch up with everything I had to do in the interim (to an extent, I'm STILL not fully recovered).

So at last I was better, and started working on Fenrir again, showed Eric the first 10K words, was moving along. I had one question for him to clarify the direction of the book, and I tried calling him and got no answer. I figured I'd try again later.

I would never get the answer, because I was calling him on July 17, 2022 -- the day he passed away. That, of course, was a stunning blow in and of itself, but it also took out Eric's publishing company, Ring of Fire press, removing most of my books from circulation in one fell swoop. I was in the middle of dealing with this fallout and trying to address the issues... when I had a heart attack on October 30th. 

Ultimately I wasn't able to seriously get back to working on Fenrir until later in 2023, and for a while it was a grinding slog. I owed this book to Baen, and I owed it to Eric, but without Eric's presence to support and oversee my tendencies for melodramatics, I was afraid I'd ruin the book. It took MONTHS before I could really begin to push forward, and accept that -- whether or not it was as good as Eric would have helped me make it -- all I could do was make it the best book *I* could write for him. 

We'll see how well I succeeded next year, when Fenrir finally comes out.