#but you come online and suddenly there's the Writer's Block Monster hiding around every corner

[queer-as-used-by-tolkien]

A lot of things come naturally to me that I often downplay or don't discuss because it feels like bragging.

For example, spelling, grammar, and formatting are no trouble at all. My first drafts are in perfect sentences, paragraphs, perfectly punctuated, everything. I didn't have to 'learn' the rules for formatting chapters, etc. or how to italicize direct thoughts. I absorbed it all by osmosis from my voracious reading in early life. Most of what I've written I've done without even touching a grammar textbook.

It sometimes surprises me how bad people can be at spelling and grammar because I'm not aware of how hard it is for most people. I just read so much, so widely when I was younger that the many, many, many examples of how a word was spelled or how sentences were structured just - sank into my brain.

And also, I write down EVERYTHING how I want it to be, right off. It's not hard for me. It's not that I have the full scene in my head and I struggle to put it on paper - it's more that it only truly happens once it's on paper. I'm sitting here writing and I won't know what's going to happen more than two lines of dialogue from now (although of course I have a vague and far-off target I'm aiming for) and then I do another line and the next line comes into view and I'm shocked but SO smugly pleased with myself because it's an AMAZING line and sets up this that and the other down the road. It just came to me. And now it's in the story. Just like that. Two hours later I'm posting the finished chapter.

I didn't even know all this was weird until I actually started getting online. In fact, it made me feel self-conscious and like I couldn't relate to other writers because I never had the same struggles they did. I didn't even struggle with writer's block. I'd see things like 'you are not a real writer until X' and I'd never experienced X? Yet I'd posted four full-length novels on FFN in the space of a year?

But I'll tell you what I'm absolutely ABYSMAL at. Physical descriptions, setting the scene/stage/etc, and of course, worldbuilding (both in my head and weaving it into the story), since I'm scarily new to non-fanfic and have always assumed my readers knew the world of the fanfic they were reading. Character description especially is problematic since I don't visualize characters in my head unless they're making an expression. I just know where they're standing. It's fog-of-war in my head when reading or writing.

Patricia C. Wrede talks about how writers get certain skills “for free”. Certain techniques or elements of writing that come naturally to them, so they don’t have to think about them too much during the process. It can be a skill that doesn’t feel like a skill because you’ve never had to consciously develop it, or it can be a learned skill you’ve internalized so well that your writing process naturally flows along those lines.

Anyway, it’s got me wondering what, if anything, I get “for free”?

Some possibilities:

A semi-detached third-person-limited viewpoint. Something that lets me get inside a character’s head while remaining just far enough outside them to have a separate narrator voice.

Banter

The sound of prose. I’m very audio-oriented, and so I don’t tend to write things that are difficult to read aloud. My initial drafts might be clunky and wordy, but I can usually edit it down into something that flows.

Worldbuilding without info-dumping. Knowing how to weave in the info at the point we need to know it.

Ideas

These are very specific things. There are a lot of important things that I really have to work for. But it’s nice to consider that there are some aspects of writing that come naturally and help shape the kind of writer that I am.