What's the hardest part to write?

What part of a story do you find the most difficult to write?

I don't have a whole lot of experience writing this type of story, but so far I have found:

1. The most difficult part to write is the actual spanking itself. The balance between description and dialogue, especially the 'no' and 'stop' and 'ow' parts. How not to make those parts sound silly. (I've sometimes spent several minutes debating how many w's should follow an ow...) How to bring it to a satisfying end. And so on and so forth; the snares are endless.

2. The second-most difficult part is the twists and turns in the pre-spanking set-up, to make it sound plausible. (I've only written stories with adults, so far, and since adults don't usually get spanked, the stories obviously require some contortionism to make the spanking seem like a natural part of the plot flow.)

3. The third-most difficult part is the post-spanking wrap-up. Now that the spanking is over, what do we do now? Just hang around and stare at each other? (No.) Talk about what just happened? (Hmm, hard to pull off elegantly without sounding contrived, at least for me, though I 've read some great stories that pulled it off really well.)

4. The easiest parts, unfortunately, seem to be the trivial, useless, irrelevant details that don't do much to advance the plot, but that are fun to include nonetheless. For some reason I can always think of dozens of those, sigh.

How aboot you?

For me there is no pattern to where a story will bog down. It happens often enough, but never in any predictable way. If there was any type of problem that tormented me more than another, I would venture to say it is when I start a story with a less-than-finished idea based solely on the appeal of dealing with some particular quirk, issue, feeling, or notion, and finding that the notion alone feels insufficient. Now, if I want to keep the piece alive, and indulge whatever notion prompted it, I have to struggle to invent some other new angle with enough strength to carry it. An those 'retro-fits' never flow easily.

For me it varies with the kind of story I am trying to write. The hardest stories are the ones that are character or situation based, i.e. they start with a character or a situation that is not spanking related in itself, but which still strikes my spanking fancy. I then have to come up with a spanking scenario that somehow fits the character or the situation. The spanking should appear to be a natural consequence of the character/situation, and this is often a hard puzzle to solve.

Otherwise, I like to write dialogue and I hate to write spanking scenes. I have tried to learn from how other people describe spankings, but the problem is that most long spanking scenes bore me to death. I usually much prefer a long, careful build-up to a long spanking scene. But I know others see it differently

For me, definitely the spanking - trying to make it vivid, erotic, convincing, and at least a bit different from previous ones I've written. And unlike Alef, I do like spanking scenes to be fairly long, and I'm often disappointed by stories that take 2000 or more words to build up and then dismiss the spanking in a couple of sentences. So I always try not to do that.

Totally agree with you, Burgundy, about "the trivial, useless, irrelevant details that don't do much to advance the plot, but that are fun to include nonetheless". And I usually try and toss in a few jokes.

Find myself agreeing with others who say describing the actual spanking itself is hard to write. Nothing is more of a turn-off are endless repetitions of sounds like OW or SMACK, and I have seen my share of stories like that on various sites.
To me the build up to the spanking, creating the background,that leads up to the person getting spanked, describing the person getting spanked, and why they are getting spanked, is the most enjoyable to write.
And then after the spanking. As one who does not care for a lot of explicit sexual activity in spanking stories I have to find something else to say.
If it is a punishment or disciplinary spanking, I like to bring out the consequences of bad behavior in the story, how the one spanked deals with it. It may be the emotional consequences, the embarrassment and humiliation. Or the physical ones, how they deal with the discomfort afterwards, especially the matter of sitting if it has been a hard spanking. or paddling.
And the future relationship between the parties, a spanked teen becoming more respectful of parents or other authority figures. Or if adults,what occurs in any future relationship, like if the spanking leads to reconciliation or easing of conflict.

The genuinely hardest part of writing a story, for me, is sitting down and getting on with it. If that's a consideration for you then my answer is "writer's block" in its various forms is the hardest part of writing a story. But I'm assuming, from the examples you give, that finding the muse is not a consideration of your question but that you are asking about developing actual content.

So for me the most difficult task is finding my MacGuffin! MacGuffin is a somewhat random word popularized by movie director Alfred Hitchcock in order to explain his most common plot device. Hitchcock said, in so-many words, that the MacGuffin is the object that is pursued by the villains, perhaps defended, desired and or searched for by the good guys. The plot is going to evolve around the McGuffin - it's the reason that the conflict and therefore the story itself even exist. One film director and critic described McGuffin this way "MacGuffin denotes any justification for the external conflictual premises of a work." Famous MacGuffins include - plans to the Death Star, the Holy Grail, the Maltese Falcon and The One Ring. Give me a MacGuffin and I can set my story in motion to its logical conclusion. This speaks to your problem #2 How do I give my, must include a spanking, story plausibility? Well Burgundy I think that a good starting point for this - and remember though this is something I have trouble with - is the forbidden fruit story. The forbidden fruit will be your MacGuffin "Sweetheart, you know I love you but if you continue to pursue [gambling, smoking, late hours, your motorcycle riding, overspending, flirting, Pokémon Go in the middle of the highway, etc.] dangerous behavior you'll have to suffer the consequences because I'd rather you'd be angry with me than...well it would just kill me to see you get hurt." So the MacGuffin is the forbidden fruit [inappropriate clothing, the T-Bird, later hours, for Lucy it was always a place in Ricky's show, finding out Superman's secret identity etc.]. Find your MacGuffin and you have your conflict, your plausibility for a spanking and therefore your story.

Justifying the adult spanking: 1. It's justified by the fact that you're writing for a collection that specializes in spanking stories. 2. Justified by knowing your audience. 3. Justified by that old saying, "If you're going to act like a child I will treat you like a child. 4. Justified by prearrangement. 5. Justified by setting up the behavior of the characters - the 'I could see that coming' spanking. 6. Secret desire of the person being spanked - goads someone into spanking them or literally begs for it. 7. Wins or loses a bet.
8. Accident (turns out not to be not their fault after all) or mistaken identity.

I could add to Sweetspot's analysis 9: placing your story in a society that accepts spanking as natural way of dealing with criminals or simply with spouses or servants.

For me the easiest part is the end. I start with it. It gives me my McGuffin, my goal. Then I (usually) write the beginning, it is also rather easy. And then comes the worst part - the building of the story, and the bridge between the conclusion and the beginning in a way that will be plausible and entertaining - ah yes - and will include a spanking scene or two. Not long, because I share with some of you the difficulty of writing a good and erotic spanking scene.

I find it hard doing descriptions of people's appearance. In fact, I quite often forget to! When I read good ones, I realise what I'm missing. I'm not great at clothing either, especially women's: I have to google different kinds of shoes and skirts. In some ways, though, with appearance, a brief description can be enough - let the reader fill in the rest. Bottoms, butts and buttocks, of course, are an essential, and I find it hard to describe those too, especially their precise shape. Seeing a perfect bottom is such a visceral experience, words escape me. I splutter.

The spanking scene is also always a challenge. Like PhilK, I feel the reader deserves a decent account of it if they've read that far. When I started out, writing them was a titillating turn-on and I revelled in lengthy purple passages, but after about 150 (in my case) it's very hard to be original even in relation to just my own work, let alone the other 26,000+ spanking descriptions here in the Library; and originality is an important motive.

Ha, I'm also constantly googling things when I write. I've had to google various aspects of spanking laws in Canada several times, for instance, and it's often remarkably difficult to find the kind of information I want even with google. Just recently I had to google the price of a 20-lb bag of catnip (to be featured in an upcoming story on this site soon...)

And you authors who've written way, way more than me, I don't know how you manage to make every spanking scene unique. I've only written, like, a dozen or so, and I'm already having trouble. (Wait, he/she has already said "ow, stop" twice, now what...)

Also agree with you, KD, about trying to spin a story around a flimsy, not-yet-well-thought-out idea. Those stories usually end up being written in pieces, with maybe the ending first, then some of the middle, then a bit of the beginning. And then I'll see if it takes off from there. Sometimes it doesn't.

For me, I would have to echo what several of the others above have said:

1) attention to physical details. I sometimes don't give much of a description other than their age and something like a skirt being flipped up (or jeans pulled down) or occasionally a ponytail thrashing. I've had a couple of stories where some commenters thought the spankee narrator was male and others thought they were female. I knew what I was thinking, but I wrote it so ambivalently that it could have been interpreted either way.

2) describing the actual spanking. It's hard to be unique. Sometimes I give a lot of detail, sometimes it's minimalist. I try to avoid the WHACK! approach unless there's some specific dialog or action that's being incorporated along with it. I seem to go through phases on implements; for a while it was switches, then hairbrushes, etc. I try to keep things relatively plausible. I don't really go for stories where parents use 4-5 different implements to punish their kids in a single session. I double-check the age of the child (if applicable) versus the punishment because some of my earlier stories got criticized for being excessive relative to their age and crime.

3) wrapping things up. This is a real struggle sometimes. Most of my endings are either quasi-happy (all is forgiven) or neutral (bet you won't do that again). Like PhilK I like to throw in some play on words in the story. If possible I like to do so at the end (ex. I wrote a story called "The Spanking Hokey-Pokey" and the last sentence was "that's what it's all about"). Sometimes stories sit unfinished because I can't figure out a decent ending.

4) branching out. Almost all of my earlier stories were female child or teen spankees, with occasional males. I've been trying to make myself write different types of stories (Flogmaster's ability to write so many different styles of stories has always impressed me). So I've done two about a F/F role-playing couple and just published my first F/M story. But those were real struggles to write since they were so different from anything else I've tried. I've got a couple more ideas for the F/F couple but I didn't think the F/M story was all that great (but at least I can say I wrote one).

I've got a few things that work for me, but others' mileage may vary. I usually have 5-6 stories working at a time in various stages of completion. i get a rough idea, create a scenario and then try to flesh out the details. So I toggle back and forth between stories filling in bits at a time; when I hit a road block on one I work on a different one. Right now I've got 14 finished stories waiting to be submitted so I can take my time with the current workload.

I've got an ideas document. When I think of a possible scenario, I just type a few notes and save it for later. That way when I'm ready to start a new story I've got some ideas to work from. Usually it's thinking of a catchy title and then just a couple of sentences with the gist of the idea. Right now I've got 27 originals, plus some sequel ideas for already published stories in the file. Sometimes I get an idea and run with it right away, but some of these ideas have been languishing for months and may never come to life. They seemed like good ideas at the time but now...

The ideas document also contains some other files that I use. After doing a lot of reading, googling, and checking a thesaurus, I created lists of the different:

1) words for spanking (beat, thrash, flog, etc.)
2) words/descriptions of butts nad parts (sit spots, crowns, orbs, ass, etc.)
3) the various colors those butts could wind up (crimson, cherry red, scarlet, etc.)
4) reactions of the spankee (howling, wailing, bawling, thrashing, etc.)

So when I write a story I mark off the descriptives as they're used, so that I know I've used a variety without repeating them too often [I did this after I figured out that that I'd used bawling 4 times in a story]. It was a lot of work on the front end but makes it easier now.

Also, to expedite things, I created a file of character names. It's hard for me to think up decent names while I'm writing the story, so I leave the names as xxx and fill them in afterwards. I've got a list of complete names I've heard/seen that I liked, but I've also got first and last names I can play mix and match with until I find a name I like. I started doing this after I submitted 2 totally unrelated stories the same week and then realized they both had a protagonist named "Maddy."

I hope this helps!