The perils of over-writing
We all know how amazing a well-crafted, well-though out, well-written book can be. We also all know how frustrating books can be when they don’t quite live up to their initial promise. There could be any number of reasons a book doesn’t turn out to be quite as good as you hoped. The plot might fall apart halfway through, or the author might give up on distinctive, interesting characters and turn them all into stereotypical clichés towards the end.
Or it could be that the book is over-written. Over-writing something is a risk for all writers, and I think we all do it at some point. We all have a phase or a point in our writing career when we simply use too many words. We get caught up in beautiful descriptions, adjectives and adverbs, and spend so long poncing around with style that we forget about the story and moving it forward.
This doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t use beautiful descriptions, just that we shouldn’t overuse them, which I think can sometimes be a tendency for some writers – particularly new writers. There is sometimes a leaning towards using more words than are strictly necessary to write a story, simply because we have in mind a word count goal that we want to meet, or because – for some reason – we think longer is always better.
Of course, sometimes longer is better, but sometimes longer just leads to over-writing. It leads to overblown descriptions and unnecessary meanderings of plot that aren’t truly essential to the story. It can be hard to spot in your own writing, but it’s certainly very annoying when you spot it in someone else’s.
This is one of the reasons all writers need an editor. We need to know when we’ve gone a bit over the top with things, and what we could cut out without ruining the impact of the story. We shouldn’t be hiding things with flowery descriptions. It might be that once we’ve cut out our over-written work, we realise that the bare bones of what we have are not quite as compelling as we might have hoped.
That can be a crushing realisation – but it’s one that it’s much better to have now than when it’s too late to do anything about it.
What do you think about books that are over-written, and what are your tips for making sure other writers don’t fall into the same trap?
