In my own case, I started with those perverse and affected stupidities I mentioned yesterday.
I sensed an area I hoped no-one had bothered to enter and I went there. I did a quick survey. But then, as fast as I could, I moved on. That’s how my early and mostly unpublished stuff seems to me now — energetic but rushed.
More recently, for the last decade, I have found myself up against a more basic stupidity.
Or a pair of them.
The world is a very busy place. Why is it so hard to write that business?
And
Individual people are very multiple and very overlapping. Why is it so hard to write that complexity?
For a writer, this becomes —
Why are sentences so bad at doing many things at once?
My obstacles, then, are multiplicity and simultaneity.
Which are really the same obstacle —
Lots of things happening all at the same time.
In this, I’m just fighting the form, surely?
Paintings easily do lots of things, and music of all sorts, and stage dramas, and film — when it’s not being lazy — is great at it.
Language was developed for coping with one thing at once, or gesturing towards lots of things.
The archbishop slowly raised the crown.
The crowd waited in awed silence.
Crown and crowd. They do their jobs well enough.
Why bother making this an obstacle?
And here’s where I’m stupid (whether or not that leads to any kind of originality).
I don’t know why this is my obstacle, it just is.
Hopefully, touch wood, you’ll soon be able to read what I’ve been working on.
By soon, I mean before the end of the decade.
Y'know, you've hit an important nail on the head there. The difference between linearity and non-linearity in writing. It's like jazz: polycentric. About 40 years ago I read a book about jazz dancing. The author emphasised mainly the polycentric nature of jazz dance. Lots of different elements are working at the same time, the bass, the lead, the percussion. The human body moving in the surrounding space following the multiplicity of the groove. When this polycentricity is employed in writing it always makes my experience as a reader more exciting. I remember the first book of yours, Toby, that I read was Beatniks. I loved the layering of the English characters' story over the exposed skeleton of Jack Kerouac's road trip. Also, I think of Lord Valentine's Castle by Robert Silverberg. Several of the characters are jugglers, travelling on the road, performing their juggling act as their main livelihood. There's a great symbolic contrast between the line of the road stretching away into the distance (stay on the path Hansel and Gretel!) and the multiplicity of the juggling act, grabbing whatever is thrown at you from many directions and taking control of the object's momentum, adjusting the spin, re-directing everything into the planet-like dance of the odd assortment thus formed.
Am I rambling on? Yes, I am.
Anyway, I always try to embrace the non-linear groove in a story I'm writing. For the fun of it, mainly, even if it may not make sense to a possible readership. I've always loved Iain M. Banks' writing for his ability to make a whole bunch of stuff happen all at the same time from different directions.
I think obstacles are like one of those management initiative tests where the players are given a bunch of useless objects which just get in their way and they have to find some way of turning these objects to their advantage.