This is one of my failings that I try to weed out of my first draft, so when I ran across this plea to Overwriters by the Editorial Ass., it resonated enough that I needed to share.
Overwriting is a difficult bug to squash. For every instance of overwriting that you manage to exterminate in a manuscript, there are at least a dozen others hiding in the text.
Why do we overwrite?
1. We are trying to prop up weak text.
2. We like proving how vocabularious we are. We just got a shiny new thesaurus and refuse to less than five 10-syllable words when describing the heroine’s hair.
The problems with overwriting?
It muddies the text, making sentences more convoluted and lengthy. The reader has to mentally slow down and sometimes re-read something two or three times before catching the meaning of it. Other times, it can make a description downright incomprehensible because of all the modifiers tacked onto it.
A main goal in writing is clean and concise prose. Never use more words than neccessary–admittedly, a tough thing to judge.
Is this a struggle for you? It often is for me, and so one of my techniques is, once I have a first draft, force myself to cut out a certain percentage of the word count–anywhere from 10-25% on the first revision. That way I’m trimming down only to the essentials.
I see that smile.
I didn’t worry about it while I was writing my first first draft. Now that I’m editing it, I wish I had. I am crossing out so many words.
Now that I’m starting my second first draft, I am being much more careful with my word choices, while trying not to obsess about it.
So we’ll see if it helps any when it comes to editing time.
p.s. I’ve commented before as ‘Lynn’, when I was still too shy to be signed in. 🙂