Which is easiest?

Novels, hands down. I can't do poetry, and as many times as I try Short, it just ends up going longer. Guess I'm naturally long-winded or somethin'

Novels or poetry, can't decide.

I hate, hate, hate the thought of writing shorts. I just can't limit myself. My stories need at least 70k words for their telling!

Poetry is easy to write. Good poetry is incredibly, backbreakingly difficult to get right. Of course, the same can be said of novels, but for me poetry is way way worse. The shortness doesn't make it easier, it makes it harder--every line is that much more important, and the structure is that much more important, and damn, there are just so many bad-poetry writing traps to fall into (at least in a novel, snappy diologue can hide some of those sins!).

To me, it is like the difference between drawing a regular, book-illustration style picture of an elephant, and doing a cubist rendition of one. Picasso is totally beyond me. Poetry is a similarly fearsome beast.

As far as effort goes, probably poetry. It doesn't have to be complicated. It doesn't have to be deep. It just needs to be evocative.

As far as quality goes, I'd say novels. Not that I think I'm really good at it, but I have more time to do it, more revisions and a couple hundred pages to hash things out, so it's "easier" to improve the quality. Poetry is too subjective, and shorts are too restrictive/precise, IMHO.

Poetry, to me, comes easy. I just can't picture me as a poet.

TallyMark said:

Poetry is easy to write. Good poetry is incredibly, backbreakingly difficult to get right.

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There ya go. I couldn't have said it better. Both poetry and short are difficult for me because you have to say so much with very few words, and I prefer to, well, just say so much. If brevity is wit, I'm somewhere between Cro-magnon Man and Paris Hilton.

Poetry's a piece of piss for me. Perhaps that's why I think I prefer writing novels. It takes more work, more time, more effort and makes me appreciate them more.

Plus, they pay better.

I was good at song lyrics when I was in high school. If I'd been mroe of an angsty-teenager, it probably would ahve been crummy poetry. Instead, they were rock-metal songs. And poems about pirates and zombies and the like.

But then, now, and probably forever, it's short stories. I'm built for writing short stories. Particularly, serial short stories. It's what I'm good at it. Get me the write set of serial short stories and I can (like I did the past two weeks) do sixty or seventy thousand words in a week or so.

Novels start to feel awkward and stretched for me after a while.

BUT! I think I've figured out a solution to that problem, and as soon as I figure out how to implement it, I'm totally going to try it.

I was a poet before I was a novelist, so I say poetry is easiest for me. I'm new a the whole novel thing. Poetry requires no research, or limits.

Articles, essays, and reviews are the easiest. Most of the time they're just a simple regurgitation of ideas, with just enough artsiness thrown in to make it fun.

Novels and shorts are more fun to write though, for what I feel are obvious reasons.

Poetry is basically an excercise to me; a chance to try out new images and phrases, ideas and such.

PeeDee said:

I was good at song lyrics when I was in high school. If I'd been mroe of an angsty-teenager, it probably would ahve been crummy poetry. Instead, they were rock-metal songs. And poems about pirates and zombies and the like.

But then, now, and probably forever, it's short stories. I'm built for writing short stories. Particularly, serial short stories. It's what I'm good at it. Get me the write set of serial short stories and I can (like I did the past two weeks) do sixty or seventy thousand words in a week or so.

Novels start to feel awkward and stretched for me after a while.

BUT! I think I've figured out a solution to that problem, and as soon as I figure out how to implement it, I'm totally going to try it.

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Pull a Charles de Lint and put all of your stories in one book. Bam. Novel.

Poetry is easier for me, (though not this week). I wouldn't know how to begin to write a novel, and greatly admire anybody who can.

engmajor2005 said:

Pull a Charles de Lint and put all of your stories in one book. Bam. Novel.

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You could've left Charles de Lint out of it, and I could have felt innovative and unique.

Hmph.

Well, I'll try writing the next novel like a series of stories and then edit them together and see how that works. Ideally, it'll mean a 60,000 word output in a week, and a novel done in a couple of weeks with energy to spare.

I picked "other" because essays are the easiest and most fun for me to write.

I voted 'other', because I find in just the writing itself, writing articles and/or essays to be much easier than writing anything else I've ever put to paper.

I've tried novels, poetry, short fiction, etc., but I find articles and essays just kind of flow with much greater ease than when I'm making something up from scratch. I can imagine some of my articles and essays being published in first draft form, because the writing just rolls off my fingers into the typewriter keyboard naturally. I don't have to force it like I do with fiction.

Also, with novels, I have trouble getting to a proper length at all. I've been told the ideal length for a debut novel is 90,000 words, but I have a terrible time getting up to that length for a book. If I do end up writing long fiction again, it most likely will be in novella form or short novel form, but I can barely scrape myself up to 90,000 words these days.

So yeah, articles and essays are the easiest things for me to write. They require the least amount of mental effort on my part where the writing itself is concerned, because I'm not trying to narrate from a character's point-of-view.

Poetry, probably because I've spent more time on it than anything else. But I'm very happy if I get 4 good poems a year out of 20. That's a good year.
I enjoy any kind of creative writing. Every form has it's challenges and easy parts.

For me writing a novel is easier. To me you need new, interesting ideas to write short stories or poems. With a novel because with it's length the focus isn't necessarily on the idea, it's on the characters and other aspects of the story.

I picked "Other" because I've never agonized over my professional writing in the same way that I do over writing fiction.

writing poetry is like surgery with a rusty spoon, just slow and ugly when I do it.

Is there really any Easy writing?? If so, tell me all about it so I can fast-track my way to fortune and fame

I put "Other" because not much in this life is easy. Not writing isn't even easy...

I voted for novels. Although I enjoy writing poetry, I find it harder to get inspired to do it.

I used to write alot of short stories for English class in school and usually did quite well with it, but strangely I've never felt the urge to write a short (fictional) story for my own enjoyment. I guess I just don't enjoy the format.

Essays are easier for me to write, shorts are easier for me to do a creditable job at. My novel wasn't hard, but it was exhausting.
As for writing poetry, you might as well ask me to turn a trout into an oak tree.

I would definitely pick poetry. Not meaning that every poem I write is wonderful or that it's necessarily easy to write a GOOD one, but that when I sit down to write one I can always put something down on paper.

Even though I enjoy writing essays/non-fiction, it's always a struggle. I'm always afraid I won't be able to do it successfully.

Novels and short stories--I always feel that what I wrote isn't good enough. The fear is enough to stop me from finishing.

I still opt for ransom notes. There's all that physical stuff up front that's hard, but the notes are easy, and they don't even have to rhyme, nor do they need any imaginative metaphors.

On the serious side, I'm trying to plan a novel--romantic comedy--set in the NYC Transit System. Why can't novels be 10,000 words?