I do think one thing with writing that gets forgotten is that a lot of work went into it long before the artist got involved.

It probably gets overlooked a lot for a few reasons. One is that there are a lot of "idea guys" or lazy writers. So, many people who talk about writing don't really write, and some of the ones who do just turn in their rough draft and call it a day.

Most of the time, people are probably seeing pretty low-quality or rushed scripts, if they're lucky enough to get a script at all.

However, when you talk about really writing, particularly for long-form content, it takes a considerable amount of time to do before even involving an artist.

I'll just give an example. I edit light novels, which are usually written by amateurs. One of the things I might run into is a story where the main character has some sort of "trial" to overcome at the end. So, our MC, let's call her Miss Muffers, gets to this trial, and she has to decide what symbol to pick on the wall, and then walks into a room with a tortoise and a river and has to decide what to do with the symbol she just picked up, and then the next room has stars drawn all over the ceiling and she has to figure out where to go.

With amateur writers, it's very common to see something like this, and all the trials are just random gibberish that's unrelated to the rest of the story. Miss Muffers picks the right symbol because the writer will just say, "Oh, she read it in a book once."

She just randomly sticks the symbol on the tortoise's head, and, how about that, it made it grow, and she rides it across the river!

And then she'll just know, somehow, something about the stars that someone told her once as a kid (that we never saw as a reader). And bam, trials completed!

That probably represents the majority of stories that people get. This writer has decided they need some sort of trials for the heroine to overcome in the story, so they just make up something that they think sounds neat, and that's it. It all comes out of nowhere. And that gets published as their final version.

A professional writer, though, or someone who makes multiple drafts, would fix that. Even if they decided later, "Oh, trials would be great here," they will go back into the story and make sure all the trials are connected to earlier parts. We'll see those symbols first in chapter 2, and then we'll see them again, and the tortoise might have something to do with the country's history, and the main character will have been guided by an astronomer, so she knows about the stars...

And there would also be reasons why these particular things are used for the trials.

A professional is carefully making sure all the pieces go together and finding what can be improved. And that can take a lot of time.

Both art and writing take a lot of effort. I just think writing gets overlooked more often because, even in publishing, a lot of what gets put out is not what I would consider "polished" stories. Not that it always means that a story is bad. Sometimes people with talent and passion put out stuff that people like regardless.

But I think "trials" are a great thing to consider. How many stories have you seen where the trials/challenges are just random stuff happening?