Oh ho ho. This seems fun.
My most pressing weakness is... I'm not sure if you would call it PACING, exactly, but it's my inability to stretch out scenes/chapters as long as I feel they should go. One of the most frustrating things that happens on EVERYTHING I write is that I sit down, work for what feels like forever, finish a scene or chapter... and then when I re-read it, it's maybe a few pages long. It feels like a breeze to just blow through it in no time at all. This isn't even just my fiction, though. It's blogging or even just every day message board posting. It feels like I take FOREVER to write something, and I say everything I have to say on the matter, but when I look at it... it's miniscule. Just this tiny little example of writing that takes a minute to read.
I'm not entirely sure how to improve in this regard, and it's something I've recognized for quite some time. When I start trying to pepper extra stuff in, it feels just like that. It's fluff. I'm saying stuff just to say it for length. That's obviously awful, but I'm never quite sure what to do to really maximize a reader's experience without getting into wasting his time. My scenes tend to be just... the meat of what's going on, but not as much flavor as I'd like. It drives me nuts. I go into my scene, I accomplish my goal, I hit all the notes I want, and I'm out. Bing, bang, boom. But it just all happens so fast that I feel a reader can't really be invested in it.
When I read other peoples' work, they have these long, fulfilling chapters where STUFF HAPPENS and things feel IMPORTANT and it takes a solid bit of time to read and absorb. Their chapters feel like a MEAL. Mine feel like a snack.
Another primary weakness of mine is this weird double-edged sword. If I plot my story out in great depth, and I have hundreds of pages of plot and ideas and definitive goals set in stone... I have a hell of a time STARTING the story. Because I get all tied up in the minutiae, I worry about making everything I establish MEAN something, and frankly... I get bored waiting to get to my BETTER ideas down the road when the characters are more fleshed out and ideas are built to a head and old events are finally paying off. That's where I WANT to be, so the earlier establishment work begins to feel like a chore. In my head, the characters at the later points are vibrant, wholly-realized individuals, so going to the very beginning and setting them up is down right tedious to me.
But that said, when I do the opposite--when I just wing and a story and make it up as I go and let the plot come to me as I write it--I will suffer greatly with ENDING the story. I get to a point where all of the sudden everything has to mean something and I need to decide on one of 10 different endings I've thought of along the way. Also, when I re-read earlier chapters, I'll find subplots or details that were abandoned or went nowhere. Brothers' Bond is lousy with all of these problems, quite frankly. And it's hilarious to me to re-read it, because it's ridiculously obvious to me every time I haphazardly changed directions. And I haven't touched it in months because I know it needs to end, and it's incredibly close to a climax, but... no ending feels fulfilling to me at this point.
What else am I poor at? I'm not particularly innovative or terribly original. I never feel like I have an idea that is brand new or inspiring.
My characters will tend towards sounding the same quite frequently because it's a lot of variations on my own voice.
I'm pretty bad at handling drama. It often feels, to me, to be devoid of any real emotion. Or it's too melodramatic and over-the-top. I'm not any better at comedy--I can write witty, charming dialogue, but a story that is funny on purpose? Ha! No. Action scenes? I'm not really bad at these, but they really suffer in regards to my primary problem of just blasting through details far too quickly.
Okay, so that was all terribly depressing. What do I consider my strengths? Or, at least, areas in which I have improved.
My description and world-building is not terrible, but I've put a LOT of work into it. I used to be really bad at it, but I've worked on it, and I feel it has improved at least marginally. I Maybe... I don't know. I'm "OK" at describing a city or using someone's mannerisms or appearance to define them. I can handle describing details without it reading like "AND THIS IS THE PART WHERE I AM DESCRIBING THIS ITEM TO YOU". Most of the time.
Dialogue. Probably the closest thing I have to an actual "strength", as opposed to just "here's something I'm not really bad at!". I can write endearing, witty, fun, snappy dialogue. I can make multiple characters really bounce off of each other and feel alive. My characters tend against soliloquy-ing, because... who besides politicians really talk in walls of text? My characters can really joust verbally, it's all very quick-hit and fluid, and their discussions feel genuine to me.