Umm. I think we've got a couple of things conflated here, so I'm going to try to disentangle what I mean, and then if necessary you can disentangle what you mean or where you meant it to apply.
In the writing of some books, I have come upon a spot in the middle of the book where the weight of all the worldbuilding/character/etc. decisions I've already made is coming down on me, but the book has not picked up quite enough gravitation to fall together under its own mass and start making helium. Because I write out of sequence, this spot is not "Chapter 16" or "that one scene with the dirigible" or whatever, because I can simply do something else if one scene is being a pill. It's a certain point of book in my head. It's like some books are shaped like this: /\ ( ) \/ and the bulgy parentheses bit in the middle is the hard bit. (Again, in length, not in book position. Other people writing sequentially makes it hard for me to express that that's not my default, sometimes.) But this one seems to have done this: /\ \/ with no bulge in the middle! That once I was done with the exciting, "Hey, I could throw this in here; there's room yet before I get to the kitchen sink!" part of the beginning, I had already achieved the, "Hey, all of this makes it fall together!" stage of the end.
Not only is this not about specific scenes, but it doesn't appear to be about total book length: while this will turn out much shorter than Thermionic Night plus Copper Mountain in story arc, it's much longer than my YAs, many of which did have that bulgy middle bit, albeit only for a few thousand words.
The other thing going on is that there is a mode of short stories in which I wanted someone to write, in their entirety. I was not, as a whole, interested in writing them myself. The whole story. So I skipped the boggy parts, that is to say, I didn't write those stories at all. But now they're looking interesting, also in their entireties. So yay.
I don't think that the bits that are boring for a particular writer to write, or that are difficult, or that provoke difficulty in completion, are necessarily bad for the reader to read. I have run into plenty of things where the writer was clearly thrilled to death with what they were writing, and the reader -- that is to say, yours truly -- was not. It'd be great if writing got to be a purely fun, creative job by way of being good writing, but I think even fun, creative jobs end up with boring sloggy bits sometimes.
no subject
In the writing of some books, I have come upon a spot in the middle of the book where the weight of all the worldbuilding/character/etc. decisions I've already made is coming down on me, but the book has not picked up quite enough gravitation to fall together under its own mass and start making helium. Because I write out of sequence, this spot is not "Chapter 16" or "that one scene with the dirigible" or whatever, because I can simply do something else if one scene is being a pill. It's a certain point of book in my head. It's like some books are shaped like this:
/\
( )
\/
and the bulgy parentheses bit in the middle is the hard bit. (Again, in length, not in book position. Other people writing sequentially makes it hard for me to express that that's not my default, sometimes.) But this one seems to have done this:
/\
\/
with no bulge in the middle! That once I was done with the exciting, "Hey, I could throw this in here; there's room yet before I get to the kitchen sink!" part of the beginning, I had already achieved the, "Hey, all of this makes it fall together!" stage of the end.
Not only is this not about specific scenes, but it doesn't appear to be about total book length: while this will turn out much shorter than Thermionic Night plus Copper Mountain in story arc, it's much longer than my YAs, many of which did have that bulgy middle bit, albeit only for a few thousand words.
The other thing going on is that there is a mode of short stories in which I wanted someone to write, in their entirety. I was not, as a whole, interested in writing them myself. The whole story. So I skipped the boggy parts, that is to say, I didn't write those stories at all. But now they're looking interesting, also in their entireties. So yay.
I don't think that the bits that are boring for a particular writer to write, or that are difficult, or that provoke difficulty in completion, are necessarily bad for the reader to read. I have run into plenty of things where the writer was clearly thrilled to death with what they were writing, and the reader -- that is to say, yours truly -- was not. It'd be great if writing got to be a purely fun, creative job by way of being good writing, but I think even fun, creative jobs end up with boring sloggy bits sometimes.