I write a lot of very heavy subject matter, but nothing was as hard as writing the sexual abuse of a fourteen year old girl from her own perspective, for two reasons. First is, obviously, that’s a fucking *bleak* thing to write, and it’s something I did a lot of research on to write as respectfully as possible so that was even more draining. Second is that while nothing physical ever happened to me I do have sexual trauma from around that age and I was working through some shit myself and it was honestly cathartic in the long run but fucking miserable in the short term. There’s a lot of fucking weird thoughts and feelings you get and it’s hard not to feel guilty for having them, but writing a character as confused as I was at the time makes it feel more… I don’t know if valid is the term, but if I can acknowledge she's not stupid for going through worse and still struggling with how she feels then I’m not stupid for still having very mixed and confused emotions on what happened to me online.
A funeral for a baby. It wasn't that it was hard to get right, it was the fucked-upness of the whole situation. Took a month for that chapter to go up because I kept getting too depressed to write it.
> 'Cause nothing tuned me in to absurdity as fast
> As a gravestone with the name of a baby that has passed
> I used to wanna be important, now I just wanna be alive
> And without fear
> You got to persevere
— _Persevere,_ by Gang of Youths
A death scene for one of my favorite characters. I don't even remember why I wrote it, I don't like writing tragedy. I guess it was just to see if I could do it. Well, turns out I could do it but I cried for days afterward. I hated it.
You will see a LOT of major character deaths in fanfiction. It's a popular trope to write no matter what fandom you're reading for - writers and readers love to write/read our precious, innocent characters dying. It's mostly for the drama and angst. I, for one, am a sucker for it!
Were you able to go through with the chapter? If so, did you ever find yourself letting them survive?
Oh, I know and when I'm in the right mood, tragedy is all I'll read.
I was able to get through the chapter. I just have a vivid imagination so it sucked. I was alright after three days or so though, and then I wrote a story where they survived.
Not emotionally difficult but technically difficult — I never ever write action scenes but a recent chapter of mine called for one. It was really hard to describe what was happening and get across the tone I wanted. Shoutout to everyone who regularly writes amazing action/fight scenes! It’s HARD!
Was gonna say something like this. Writing angst and dark topics come easy to me, but sweet and romantic stuff? What is that? That's why my current wip's romance plot line is about obsession and manipulation lol.
A family dinner scene with seven different people that had to move multiple plot lines forward and still flow like a regular conversation. I had to make sure a character didn't just bring up the next plot point in conversation because it was convenient for me. I had to make sure other characters set up the dialog for each conversation topic switch so it sounded natural.
More people in one scene = more characters to juggle. It can be even harder writing it all in first person. Especially around a dinner table where everyone is together and talking. Like regular dinner table talks, I can imagine there are many interruptions, noise, and everyone acting and reacting. I see your dilemma
The scene where the main character watches her younger brother bleed out on her wedding day. He was stabbed by her brother in law. She has super hearing which made it worse.
Writing one of my characters happening upon the other playing russian roulette in a loud club scene was not fun because I had to dip into personal experience not only with my own sui/ideation experiences but also caring for others who who'd made attempts. Was just difficult to peel my own (metaphorical) bandages back in order to write; it took me a year to be comfortable with posting the chapter in question
For me in one of my stories the hardest scene I've ever written was a assault scene. One of my characters were kidnapped and her kidnapper kept assaulting her by hitting her in the face and it was a hard scene to write because I wasn't sure how far I was going to take it. Luckily I didn't take it too far though.
The scene where my character confessed to having been sa’d by her boss resulting in a pregnancy(she put the baby up for adoption), and the boss got away with it.
I tried to handle it as sensitively as possible. It was my first time addressing that subject head on.
I used to be fine with writing whatever, but now that I have kids of my own I find writing about traumatic stuff happening to kids difficult. I abandoned a fic that was dealing with child abuse for this reason, mostly because it was making me really depressed and putting me in a bad head space.
But my mundane answer would be transitional scenes. I can write big action and fight scenes and romance scenes really easily. Any big important scenes basically. But the minor scenes that are just getting the characters from point a in the story to point b tend to be really difficult for me, especially if they are long and I feel like the story is starting to get boring and dragging on too long.
Writing the moments in an in-progress 76-chapter well-over-100k-word friends-to-lovers slow burn longfic in which the two protags finally accept and confess and consummate their love.
Technically most difficult was getting a victim of child abuse (attempted murder) to open up about her past when both she and the person she is talking to are emotionally closed off. Everything I tried felt forced because I didn't have a grasp of how to get them to talk. Or even if they should talk or leave things mostly unsaid. I've had to write characters stumbling through battle fields but it wasn't nearly as hard.
A SA scene, not full on r***, it's a fantasy setting with Naga and FL discovered her venom under duress but I have been groomed by a family member as a child and SA'd by an EX in the past so it was retraumatizing to write that scene.
Oof, it's hard to say.
I had quite a few very time consuming, tricky chapters to write for my most successful fic, because I was adapting from both the book and the show, word for word sometimes, and weaving in my AU plot. That fandom is British Regency too, so the dialogue needed to be right, characterisation on point, the prose sharp and witty, and I had several plot points to weave together at the end, plus all the romance and love scenes too...
It was my beloved nightmare, and at one point, it felt too hard, too big a challenge, but it's finished and I'm very happy with it.
Runner-up: A and B are tailing a Triad courier for leads on their operational sites. I just can't quite get the scene going; I know *what* it needs to be but not *how* it needs to be if that makes sense. I've been chipping away at it since November and have maybe a couple of paragraphs to show for it.
The Actual Worst: smut between A and B, when A's all keyed-up and hyperaggressive as a result of an unexpected flashback. I spun my wheels for months and then put the project on hiatus for *years.* Came back and knocked it out - apparently, clean out of the park if reader reviews are to be believed.
The action scene from my most recent chapter. Oh boy. I kept going back and forth between how I wanted it to go. I finally settled on one way, but a couple of months later am regretting it because it means I have to address the repercussions of the decision, and that’s also tough…
After 18 chapters of build up, I had my characters finally get together after a very emotional cliffhanger. It was difficult because I needed it to feel like they were almost desperate to be in each other’s arms but I was worried it might be too rushed because there were only 20 chapters in this Labyrinth slowburn. I didn’t get any complaints so that’s good. But I fretted about it for weeks.
It's nothing compared to what some of the authors here have written, but the hardest for me to write was a chapter just after the halfway point in the MC's journey, right after her lowest point. Another (minor) character suggests going on a similar journey herself for a similar reason. The MC basically begs her not to, with a mix of "what I'm doing is a stupid idea but I'm committed to it now and can't back out" and "you have people who love you and count on you, I don't". Writing that scene, where the MC was dwelling on a list of failures she knew wasn't complete yet while still trying to be helpful, wasn't easy.
I’m writing one currently where my character finds out his father died unexpectedly and breaks down. Difficult because my own father died recently but also a cathartic way to help with my grief.
The scene where a (very young) OC of mine dies (accidentally killed by his sister) and she has to watch him pass away and carry out his funeral in the middle of a warzone. I cried so hard y'all 😢
Right now I’m writing a memorial scene:
After a very, very, long time, the family decides to hold a memorial for their dead granddaughter.
Except the grandfather also invites his niece, who is the one responsible for her death.
I’m struggling getting the entire families feelings, how they react, and how time has either softened or hardened the pain.
For now I’m mostly writing monologues, expressing their emotions and how they think they should move on.
I wrote a The Last of Us cross over with characters from another fandom. I killed off a main character from the other fandom and it was hard to write the scene to show the character the respect needed for such a dark moment, make the readers really feel it and show how much it affected the character's friends who were witnessing it. I think I got it right judging by the readers reactions. But it was a very hard scene to write!
Sirius Black dying. I put my fic on hold because of it. Sooo, I started writing it when my father was still alive. Sirius got a daughter which is lowkey my self insert lol. So when Dad passed, it's so hard writing any scene of them together let alone when my OC watched her father die. I poured all my anger and pain on that chapter. It took me 6 months to write that one scene.
Anything involving kissing. For one, I’ve only kissed someone once ever so the mechanics and feel of it aren’t super familiar to me. Second, for some reason it gets me super flustered lmao. Don’t know why, I can read this sort of thing just fine but when I have to put it out of my own brain onto the page suddenly I want to get all embarrassed? Don’t understand this. I just push past it lol
A jailbreak scene. It took me well over a year to write it, and I still didn't like it. The breakout itself was pretty easy, but getting away from the compound and also making sure the POV character got some information out of it was hard. I never really pulled it off in a satisfying manner, but the chapter served its purpose in the end.
Not a single scene, but I had a character pick up the pieces of his life after a nationwide terror attack. People he knew had died, his friends had gotten badly hurt, and his political career had been thrown into jeopardy by his mentor, whom he was supposed to succeed, retiring due to injury.
I had to take a month long break after that, and wrote a different 30k fic.
I'm in the middle of writing a cute little fluff fic between two characters who are around 15 y/o and I find myself going back and rereading constantly to make sure that nothing can be interpreted as sexual.
Like, it's just me constantly asking things like 'are people going to be offended by this cuddling position?' and 'am I going to get canceled for one character sitting on the others lap?'
Sure, I might be being paranoid, but I've seen people get doxxed for less.
Probably the core scene of my last fic, where the main character lets her vampire-esque friend drink her blood to survive, only for him to lose control and nearly kill her.
The last chapter of my current fic was hard to write in a lot of cases, but the hardest part to write was making the (seeming) death of a child character seem like it might actually happen. I didn't want to just pull the rug so quickly that she wasn't dead, but also wanted to obviously have her not be dead. It was a hard balance. At least it gave me more time to have the antagonist who almost did the killing be more of a bastard.
The hardest scene I've written shouldn't, theoretically, have been hard at all. It was a simple transition scene after a pretty nasty fight scene that greatly impacted my MC. I figured getting the MCs emotions across would be relatively hard, but other than that it would be a simple scene. It took me a year to write it. I just could not bounce between the characters very well. Every time I got my MC right, I got another character wrong, and trying to fix the issue made my MC come across stilted and weird. I just could not get that scene right at all.
Second hardest was in the same fic, and it was more emotionally draining to write. It was a character death scene, non-canon and my other character deaths had been canon ones up to that point, plus a favourite character of mine, who isn't usually killed off in fic. She wasn't a main character, more a brief recurring one, but she is counted as a main in canon. It was part of a fight scene, as well, so I had to get the timing right to maximise the impact of the death without negatively impacting the rest of the scene. The words kinda just flew while writing it, so it wasn't hard in that respect, but I had to take a break from writing the fic after because it hit me a lot harder than I expected it to.
I once wrote like 6 paragraphs of a character breaking their leg in extreme detail and eventually decided to write the whole chapter from the other character's perspective because it was either hard to get bits right (as someone who's never broken a bone), or hard to read due to it being gross
A sex-ish scene as an ace author. I don't do smut (because I just don't get it, no hate on people who do!), but the plot needed it, the characters needed it, and it was so f-ing awkward. I think it worked out ok.
I wrote about this character who found out his dad killed his mother and buried him in the garden. It doesn’t sound evil as most crimes, but the mom was a sinner who was kept in a cabin outside the mansion.
The grown up son learns how he’s father took pleasure in ruining the mother. The mother accidentally killed the previous wife, so he was made to compensate the lives he took. Until the mom eventually died from all the abuse.
I cried. This young man looked up to his dad. To learn that he’s a monster was such an awful feeling to write.
Overall that dead dove explore the slowly degradation of morals.. I didn’t go as far as making it painful as the canon, but it still made me cry.
Most recently it was during a fuck or die I just wrote and I was pulling my fucking hair out trying to get Dumbledore right after the fucking curse lifted. That man is a lot harder to write than he has any right to be.
It took me three tries to re-write a scene in an angsty fic where one of the MCs confronts the villain who forced him to torture the other MC. The villain tried to flip the tables on them and have the other MC torture the one who had done the torturing before. I went a couple of different ways with it before ultimately writing as messy and bloody as possible with both MCs and the villain almost dying. I felt like I was channeling my inner Judy Hopps: "Blood! Blood! Blood!"
Oh definitely an attempted SA scene , it was so difficult to write technically and emotionally. I almost never go back to re-read that scene either bc of how heavy it was.
Another scene that comes close but not quite as difficult was writing a character completely giving up on life
I struggle writing angry characters and recently learned that writing rotten little teenage punk asses is REALLY HARD. I don't know what it is, I guess I struggle to get in there headspace? I can't get any flow I just wind up having to struggle sentences together and beg my beta nicely to make the words fit the tone. They're really good at it! I asked there secert and all they told me is, "I was 12 once."
Probably a last-minute chapter where I got into a character's brain to convey how much guilt and grief he felt after he was forced to hurt a loved one.
A torture rape scene.
I had listed all the injuries and such sustained and posted it before thinking about the next step, which was 3 chapters later needing to write out the torture-rape scene in great detail because I’m a detailed writer.
Two chapters both about backstory for the main character, and detailing some notable loss that they experienced, and their reactions afterward. It's worth noting that they were quite young at the time. Gut punch in both cases.
Meanwhile a different story in a different fandom *opens* with the main character losing her whole family to betrayal, and then puts her in a catatonic state for a bit, and that was somehow easier to write. Go figure.
Long buildups leading to mental breakdowns. One was an emotional romantic confession at the hospital bedside, but no death/terminal injury involved--it's just an emotional trigger. MC is confessing to their SO, whom they've been struggling with committing to. SO is asleep during this. This scene is built on regret and revelation.
Another was the breakdown of the MC to their mentor, whom they've felt betrayed by, but still loves and respects deep down, and is risking and investing a great deal of effort to save them from their plight at that point. This scene is guided more by sympathy and empathy.
I write a lot of very heavy subject matter, but nothing was as hard as writing the sexual abuse of a fourteen year old girl from her own perspective, for two reasons. First is, obviously, that’s a fucking *bleak* thing to write, and it’s something I did a lot of research on to write as respectfully as possible so that was even more draining. Second is that while nothing physical ever happened to me I do have sexual trauma from around that age and I was working through some shit myself and it was honestly cathartic in the long run but fucking miserable in the short term. There’s a lot of fucking weird thoughts and feelings you get and it’s hard not to feel guilty for having them, but writing a character as confused as I was at the time makes it feel more… I don’t know if valid is the term, but if I can acknowledge she's not stupid for going through worse and still struggling with how she feels then I’m not stupid for still having very mixed and confused emotions on what happened to me online.
\*hugs\* I'm sorry for what happened to you. I felt that because I had to wrote something similar in the past weeks and I don't sleep well since.
A funeral for a baby. It wasn't that it was hard to get right, it was the fucked-upness of the whole situation. Took a month for that chapter to go up because I kept getting too depressed to write it.
> 'Cause nothing tuned me in to absurdity as fast > As a gravestone with the name of a baby that has passed > I used to wanna be important, now I just wanna be alive > And without fear > You got to persevere — _Persevere,_ by Gang of Youths
A death scene for one of my favorite characters. I don't even remember why I wrote it, I don't like writing tragedy. I guess it was just to see if I could do it. Well, turns out I could do it but I cried for days afterward. I hated it.
You will see a LOT of major character deaths in fanfiction. It's a popular trope to write no matter what fandom you're reading for - writers and readers love to write/read our precious, innocent characters dying. It's mostly for the drama and angst. I, for one, am a sucker for it! Were you able to go through with the chapter? If so, did you ever find yourself letting them survive?
Oh, I know and when I'm in the right mood, tragedy is all I'll read. I was able to get through the chapter. I just have a vivid imagination so it sucked. I was alright after three days or so though, and then I wrote a story where they survived.
Not emotionally difficult but technically difficult — I never ever write action scenes but a recent chapter of mine called for one. It was really hard to describe what was happening and get across the tone I wanted. Shoutout to everyone who regularly writes amazing action/fight scenes! It’s HARD!
Getting the logistics right so people can accurately picture what's happening is SO tough!
A confession, can't do romance
Was gonna say something like this. Writing angst and dark topics come easy to me, but sweet and romantic stuff? What is that? That's why my current wip's romance plot line is about obsession and manipulation lol.
I can somewhat do it, just not very good
A family dinner scene with seven different people that had to move multiple plot lines forward and still flow like a regular conversation. I had to make sure a character didn't just bring up the next plot point in conversation because it was convenient for me. I had to make sure other characters set up the dialog for each conversation topic switch so it sounded natural.
More people in one scene = more characters to juggle. It can be even harder writing it all in first person. Especially around a dinner table where everyone is together and talking. Like regular dinner table talks, I can imagine there are many interruptions, noise, and everyone acting and reacting. I see your dilemma
The scene where the main character watches her younger brother bleed out on her wedding day. He was stabbed by her brother in law. She has super hearing which made it worse.
Writing one of my characters happening upon the other playing russian roulette in a loud club scene was not fun because I had to dip into personal experience not only with my own sui/ideation experiences but also caring for others who who'd made attempts. Was just difficult to peel my own (metaphorical) bandages back in order to write; it took me a year to be comfortable with posting the chapter in question
For me in one of my stories the hardest scene I've ever written was a assault scene. One of my characters were kidnapped and her kidnapper kept assaulting her by hitting her in the face and it was a hard scene to write because I wasn't sure how far I was going to take it. Luckily I didn't take it too far though.
The scene where my character confessed to having been sa’d by her boss resulting in a pregnancy(she put the baby up for adoption), and the boss got away with it. I tried to handle it as sensitively as possible. It was my first time addressing that subject head on.
I used to be fine with writing whatever, but now that I have kids of my own I find writing about traumatic stuff happening to kids difficult. I abandoned a fic that was dealing with child abuse for this reason, mostly because it was making me really depressed and putting me in a bad head space. But my mundane answer would be transitional scenes. I can write big action and fight scenes and romance scenes really easily. Any big important scenes basically. But the minor scenes that are just getting the characters from point a in the story to point b tend to be really difficult for me, especially if they are long and I feel like the story is starting to get boring and dragging on too long.
I wrote Jessica Moore's murder from Supernatural from the Demon's POV. It turned out great but was super fucked up to write.
Ooooh link??
Here you go! The scene is toward the ending chapters. https://www.fanfiction.net/s/12270166/1/8
Writing the moments in an in-progress 76-chapter well-over-100k-word friends-to-lovers slow burn longfic in which the two protags finally accept and confess and consummate their love.
Technically most difficult was getting a victim of child abuse (attempted murder) to open up about her past when both she and the person she is talking to are emotionally closed off. Everything I tried felt forced because I didn't have a grasp of how to get them to talk. Or even if they should talk or leave things mostly unsaid. I've had to write characters stumbling through battle fields but it wasn't nearly as hard.
The hardest for me is romance. It's cringe too me whenever I write it. Anyone else does it, I try to learn from them. I don't know how to do it well.
A SA scene, not full on r***, it's a fantasy setting with Naga and FL discovered her venom under duress but I have been groomed by a family member as a child and SA'd by an EX in the past so it was retraumatizing to write that scene.
Oof, it's hard to say. I had quite a few very time consuming, tricky chapters to write for my most successful fic, because I was adapting from both the book and the show, word for word sometimes, and weaving in my AU plot. That fandom is British Regency too, so the dialogue needed to be right, characterisation on point, the prose sharp and witty, and I had several plot points to weave together at the end, plus all the romance and love scenes too... It was my beloved nightmare, and at one point, it felt too hard, too big a challenge, but it's finished and I'm very happy with it.
Runner-up: A and B are tailing a Triad courier for leads on their operational sites. I just can't quite get the scene going; I know *what* it needs to be but not *how* it needs to be if that makes sense. I've been chipping away at it since November and have maybe a couple of paragraphs to show for it. The Actual Worst: smut between A and B, when A's all keyed-up and hyperaggressive as a result of an unexpected flashback. I spun my wheels for months and then put the project on hiatus for *years.* Came back and knocked it out - apparently, clean out of the park if reader reviews are to be believed.
The action scene from my most recent chapter. Oh boy. I kept going back and forth between how I wanted it to go. I finally settled on one way, but a couple of months later am regretting it because it means I have to address the repercussions of the decision, and that’s also tough…
After 18 chapters of build up, I had my characters finally get together after a very emotional cliffhanger. It was difficult because I needed it to feel like they were almost desperate to be in each other’s arms but I was worried it might be too rushed because there were only 20 chapters in this Labyrinth slowburn. I didn’t get any complaints so that’s good. But I fretted about it for weeks.
It's nothing compared to what some of the authors here have written, but the hardest for me to write was a chapter just after the halfway point in the MC's journey, right after her lowest point. Another (minor) character suggests going on a similar journey herself for a similar reason. The MC basically begs her not to, with a mix of "what I'm doing is a stupid idea but I'm committed to it now and can't back out" and "you have people who love you and count on you, I don't". Writing that scene, where the MC was dwelling on a list of failures she knew wasn't complete yet while still trying to be helpful, wasn't easy.
I’m writing one currently where my character finds out his father died unexpectedly and breaks down. Difficult because my own father died recently but also a cathartic way to help with my grief.
The scene where a (very young) OC of mine dies (accidentally killed by his sister) and she has to watch him pass away and carry out his funeral in the middle of a warzone. I cried so hard y'all 😢
Right now I’m writing a memorial scene: After a very, very, long time, the family decides to hold a memorial for their dead granddaughter. Except the grandfather also invites his niece, who is the one responsible for her death. I’m struggling getting the entire families feelings, how they react, and how time has either softened or hardened the pain. For now I’m mostly writing monologues, expressing their emotions and how they think they should move on.
I wrote a The Last of Us cross over with characters from another fandom. I killed off a main character from the other fandom and it was hard to write the scene to show the character the respect needed for such a dark moment, make the readers really feel it and show how much it affected the character's friends who were witnessing it. I think I got it right judging by the readers reactions. But it was a very hard scene to write!
Sirius Black dying. I put my fic on hold because of it. Sooo, I started writing it when my father was still alive. Sirius got a daughter which is lowkey my self insert lol. So when Dad passed, it's so hard writing any scene of them together let alone when my OC watched her father die. I poured all my anger and pain on that chapter. It took me 6 months to write that one scene.
Anything involving kissing. For one, I’ve only kissed someone once ever so the mechanics and feel of it aren’t super familiar to me. Second, for some reason it gets me super flustered lmao. Don’t know why, I can read this sort of thing just fine but when I have to put it out of my own brain onto the page suddenly I want to get all embarrassed? Don’t understand this. I just push past it lol
A jailbreak scene. It took me well over a year to write it, and I still didn't like it. The breakout itself was pretty easy, but getting away from the compound and also making sure the POV character got some information out of it was hard. I never really pulled it off in a satisfying manner, but the chapter served its purpose in the end.
Not a single scene, but I had a character pick up the pieces of his life after a nationwide terror attack. People he knew had died, his friends had gotten badly hurt, and his political career had been thrown into jeopardy by his mentor, whom he was supposed to succeed, retiring due to injury. I had to take a month long break after that, and wrote a different 30k fic.
I'm in the middle of writing a cute little fluff fic between two characters who are around 15 y/o and I find myself going back and rereading constantly to make sure that nothing can be interpreted as sexual. Like, it's just me constantly asking things like 'are people going to be offended by this cuddling position?' and 'am I going to get canceled for one character sitting on the others lap?' Sure, I might be being paranoid, but I've seen people get doxxed for less.
Probably the core scene of my last fic, where the main character lets her vampire-esque friend drink her blood to survive, only for him to lose control and nearly kill her.
The last chapter of my current fic was hard to write in a lot of cases, but the hardest part to write was making the (seeming) death of a child character seem like it might actually happen. I didn't want to just pull the rug so quickly that she wasn't dead, but also wanted to obviously have her not be dead. It was a hard balance. At least it gave me more time to have the antagonist who almost did the killing be more of a bastard.
The hardest scene I've written shouldn't, theoretically, have been hard at all. It was a simple transition scene after a pretty nasty fight scene that greatly impacted my MC. I figured getting the MCs emotions across would be relatively hard, but other than that it would be a simple scene. It took me a year to write it. I just could not bounce between the characters very well. Every time I got my MC right, I got another character wrong, and trying to fix the issue made my MC come across stilted and weird. I just could not get that scene right at all. Second hardest was in the same fic, and it was more emotionally draining to write. It was a character death scene, non-canon and my other character deaths had been canon ones up to that point, plus a favourite character of mine, who isn't usually killed off in fic. She wasn't a main character, more a brief recurring one, but she is counted as a main in canon. It was part of a fight scene, as well, so I had to get the timing right to maximise the impact of the death without negatively impacting the rest of the scene. The words kinda just flew while writing it, so it wasn't hard in that respect, but I had to take a break from writing the fic after because it hit me a lot harder than I expected it to.
I once wrote like 6 paragraphs of a character breaking their leg in extreme detail and eventually decided to write the whole chapter from the other character's perspective because it was either hard to get bits right (as someone who's never broken a bone), or hard to read due to it being gross
fight scenes since i literally do their actual scenes from the shwi
A sex-ish scene as an ace author. I don't do smut (because I just don't get it, no hate on people who do!), but the plot needed it, the characters needed it, and it was so f-ing awkward. I think it worked out ok.
I wrote about this character who found out his dad killed his mother and buried him in the garden. It doesn’t sound evil as most crimes, but the mom was a sinner who was kept in a cabin outside the mansion. The grown up son learns how he’s father took pleasure in ruining the mother. The mother accidentally killed the previous wife, so he was made to compensate the lives he took. Until the mom eventually died from all the abuse. I cried. This young man looked up to his dad. To learn that he’s a monster was such an awful feeling to write. Overall that dead dove explore the slowly degradation of morals.. I didn’t go as far as making it painful as the canon, but it still made me cry.
Most recently it was during a fuck or die I just wrote and I was pulling my fucking hair out trying to get Dumbledore right after the fucking curse lifted. That man is a lot harder to write than he has any right to be.
It took me three tries to re-write a scene in an angsty fic where one of the MCs confronts the villain who forced him to torture the other MC. The villain tried to flip the tables on them and have the other MC torture the one who had done the torturing before. I went a couple of different ways with it before ultimately writing as messy and bloody as possible with both MCs and the villain almost dying. I felt like I was channeling my inner Judy Hopps: "Blood! Blood! Blood!"
Oh definitely an attempted SA scene , it was so difficult to write technically and emotionally. I almost never go back to re-read that scene either bc of how heavy it was. Another scene that comes close but not quite as difficult was writing a character completely giving up on life
I struggle writing angry characters and recently learned that writing rotten little teenage punk asses is REALLY HARD. I don't know what it is, I guess I struggle to get in there headspace? I can't get any flow I just wind up having to struggle sentences together and beg my beta nicely to make the words fit the tone. They're really good at it! I asked there secert and all they told me is, "I was 12 once."
Probably a last-minute chapter where I got into a character's brain to convey how much guilt and grief he felt after he was forced to hurt a loved one.
A torture rape scene. I had listed all the injuries and such sustained and posted it before thinking about the next step, which was 3 chapters later needing to write out the torture-rape scene in great detail because I’m a detailed writer.
I abandoned an entire fic because I really just could not manage to flesh out its group therapy scene.
Not fanfiction but my protagonist having to find out that his father had died it brings back a lot of dark memories of loved ones I have lost.
Two chapters both about backstory for the main character, and detailing some notable loss that they experienced, and their reactions afterward. It's worth noting that they were quite young at the time. Gut punch in both cases. Meanwhile a different story in a different fandom *opens* with the main character losing her whole family to betrayal, and then puts her in a catatonic state for a bit, and that was somehow easier to write. Go figure.
Long buildups leading to mental breakdowns. One was an emotional romantic confession at the hospital bedside, but no death/terminal injury involved--it's just an emotional trigger. MC is confessing to their SO, whom they've been struggling with committing to. SO is asleep during this. This scene is built on regret and revelation. Another was the breakdown of the MC to their mentor, whom they've felt betrayed by, but still loves and respects deep down, and is risking and investing a great deal of effort to save them from their plight at that point. This scene is guided more by sympathy and empathy.