Most of the time it's like squeezing out sparks for me. t piff paff

Squeezing out sparks?

not allowing yourself to be seduced away

You get to the hard "tie together all the lines" part, and this new idea pops into your head, all shiny in its potential, and you just want to go play with it ...

I tend to think of it as the "make the characters really suffer for what they've done" round. No wonder my characters keep chattering away... they're trying to stave off inevitable doom.

I think the hardest part is actually finishing the story, and not allowing yourself to be seduced away, and starting another, abandoning the original effort to obscurity.

Oh, wrod. The Regency romance I'm working on (though with the length and a few sex scenes, I think I'll market it as a Regency-set historical instead) has already spawned two sequel bunnies. One of which will involve massive research on the exact details of the Peninsular Wars ca. 1812, the other equally detailed research on life in Philadelphia ca. 1816. And probably Quakers. And then there's the unrelated time travel plot bunny, requiring copious research on both the hero's original era and how he'd pull off his modern life, not least of which how you'd construct a legal American identity and plausible backstory for someone born 2000 years ago.

That's before we even get into the assorted fantasy worlds. I really have to do something with the pseudo-Polynesian culture I created for a project I never finished from 6 years ago, though my view of the real-world situation that inspired it has changed so much I can't go back to the story itself. And I have another one that took off when I was sitting in church wondering what might've become of David's daughter who was raped by her half-brother (Tamar?) and grew from there. I now have my Tamar-figure's daughter trying to hide her sorcerous powers and pull off a political coup.

I want to write all of these. They tease at my brain, saying if I don't start them now, I'll forget why they seem so inspiring. But I'm going to finish the current project first or die trying.

Oh my god! I know exactly what you mean! And then the research itself is its own danger, because then it spawns all these new ideas, which lead to new characters, and their adventures, and they're all impatient and want to be written, but their adventure requires even more research in another vein, and that leads to even more problems.

Left to myself, I write radio plays. Then I have to go back and edit in the other four senses.

Skipping ahead to say: Me too!

I love dialogue. NSM with the "The bobbing bluebells knelt down before breeze," or whatever descriptive text is supposed to sound like. :)

Heh. It doesn't matter what I'm writing, Original or FF, it's dialogue heavy.

I have to go back and add things in between the snark bouts.

FWIW, I've been told that writers tend to rely on one primary sense -- some are more aural, some more tactile, some more visual. I'm very visual, to the point that my dialogue has lots of exact descriptions of how characters gesture as they make a point, or what they look like as they react to information. On rewrite, I try to cut that down quite a bit.

Theo -- your point about a primary sense is so interesting! I know I hav a visual sense somewhere. I guess I'll just have to see if I left it under the bed. Or maybe I put it in storage.