The primary challenge of writing for me is traversing the space between the first draft - which might establish some, if not all, of the primary ingredients which will shape the story - and the final product, in which they have been refined and optimized to (hopefully) maximum effect.
The method for crossing this gulf is a mystery to me, in so much as refinement must occur on multiple scales - some of which possess a compositional or logistical complexity larger than my working memory. Surely some form of summarizing, or some other reductive process, can increase the scale across which a person can effectively optimize writing, but I don't know what those methods consist of. In my writing, I can collect themes and ideas into a text, and I can optimize well enough on the sentence and perhaps paragraph level, but I do not know how to trace a series of paragraphs or whole sections of a text gracefully along forms that will produce some profound cumulative effect.
Anyway, I think this is why my stories so often read 'flat.'
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