[komali2]

Writer's perspective - starting and ending a book are the top 2 hardest things, in my opinion, especially because editors get all up your ass about beginnings. I suspect this has to do with primacy principle, i.e.the editor is "most aware" during the beginning of the reading, and also aware that readers do the same thing. They will pick up the book in the bookstore and possibly skim the beginning to see if they should buy, so you gotta hook.

Other things I find difficult about writing:

Ending chapters (I saw a really bad one once in the Broken Earth trilogy that was basically "[character] realized she had nothing more to say, so she walked away." I totally understood how the author got herself in that situation lol)

Making decisions on tropes. For example, say I'm writing a sci fi with a "rise of the machines" plot point (I am). What is the nature of those machines? Rampant AI in existent technology? Did it make war-bots? Or maybe multiple rampant AIs in autonomous bots? Etc. There's like fifty of these kinds of decisions I need to make in a book I'm working on now.

Writing dialogue that's interesting, but not campy, but realistic, but not drab.

[hinkley]

Did you ever see Throw Momma From the Train?

Crystal’s character has writers block because he is fixated on a good first sentence setting the tone for the rest of the novel, and he never gets past line one.

[mirimir]

Stover's Caine's Law starts with an author's note: "Several parts of this story take place before the events depicted in Act of Atonement Book 1: Caine Black Knife. Other parts of this story take place after. Still other parts take place before and after both. Some parts may be imaginary, and some were real only temporarily, as they have subsequently unhappened."

That must have been driven by comments from initial readers, I suspect. Basically, some of the characters are rewriting the overall story of the series.