Sometimes writing is easy, and sometimes not so much

My Christmas story is done! Hooray!!!

I’m really happy with it, but wow, did that take forever. Sometimes I’ll start a story and the words just pour out onto the page, and other times it takes a Herculean effort to write a paragraph. With this story, which I titled “The Least Merry Elf,” I ran into both kinds of writing.

My rule of thumb is to not worry if a story is hard to start because by the time I’m about 1,000 words in I’ve usually gotten comfortable enough with the character whose poi...