The classic example of overwriting is this travesty...er, paragraph...
“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain
fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a
violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our
scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty
flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.” — Edward George
Bulwer-Lytton, Paul CLIFFORD (1830)
And yet people still write like this. On purpose. Without
knowing that millions of other writers will mock them and make comments like, “I
should enter this in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest, “Where ‘WWW’ means ‘Wretched
Writers Welcome’”!
What is overwriting – besides the obvious resulting
fifty-eight word sentence...
Excuse me? You don’t see anything wrong with the paragraph
above and see difference between it and the first sentence of Charles Dickens’
classic literary novel, A TALE OF TWO CITIES (1859)? The line that is oft-quoted
but almost never completed – “It was the best of times, it was the worst of
times...” (see the COMPLETE, one hundred and twenty-eight word sentence here: http://www.memorablequotations.com/Cities.htm)?
No difference to you?
*sigh*
I would love to use some examples of unpublished works I’ve
read recently in my volunteer position as slush reader for STUPEFYING STORIES.
There are some real humdingers I’ve read there, let me tell you! But not only
would that be unethical, putting them up on my blog would constitute publishing
them – and would give them the same, slightly less elevated status as Bulwer-Lytton’s
and Dickens’ work. So I’ll dissect my own work.
While editors have never, in my experience come right out
and said, “OVERWRITING!”, they have employed several euphemistic phrases I’ve
quoted below:
“I actually found the language you used to be rather dense
and information-heavy, which didn't make for particularly easy reading. I would
suggest revisiting it with a thought to simplifying it a little for more ease
of comprehension.”
“Almost impossible for me to get around the massive amount
of information in this piece. It seems like you were attempting to squeeze a
novel into a short story.”
“some sentences were difficult to parse (e.g., on p. 18,
"Human bodies would flare into the atmosphere and burn up so that the many
would put troops down on Weedworld.")...The preponderance of alien names
made for some confusing passages, though, and we find our readers prefer things
a bit more straightforward -- smoother, with less chance of getting jarred out
of the story…”
“Story exceeds our 8k maximum word count”
So what does overwriting mean?
In my experience, it means using more words than are
necessary to say something in the story – more than that, though, it means not
using the RIGHT words to say something.
Let’s go to poetry – I know, what does poetry have to do
with writing stories? I deal with this question the first day of every Writing
To Get Published summer school session I teach. In fact, I deal with it on a
personal level as well. But when I look at the definition of POETRY, these
definitions reflect what I usually get from kids as well as my own perception
of it: “Poetry in the Bible has been well defined as ‘the measured language of
emotion.’ Hebrew poetry deals almost exclusively with the great question of
man's relation to God. Guilt, condemnation, punishment, pardon, redemption,
repentance are the awful themes of this heaven-born poetry.” (http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/poetry?s=t)
“When I used to ask students what a poem is, I would get answers
like ‘a painting in words,’ or ‘a medium for self-expression,’ or ‘a song that
rhymes and displays beauty.’... ‘One might argue that the page is just a
metaphor for all that can’t be put on it, and that a poem is merely a
substitution, for better or for worse, for a lived feeling or event.’” (http://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/11/what-is-a-poem/281835/)
When I overwrite, I am trying to say something profound. I’m
ALWAYS trying to say something profound. My most recently published story
looked at the morality of using organic monkey brains instead of computer chips
in disposable work satellites. (“612 See, 612 Do”, http://www.perihelionsf.com/1407/anomalies.htm)
Sometimes I do a better job of it. My wife says that short stories are my
forte, and maybe that’s true because I work so hard at saying what I’m trying
to say with as few carefully chosen words as possible.
And THAT is what overwriting doesn’t do – a writer just…vomits
on to a page without giving proper weight to each word. I rarely notice when I’m
overwriting; I usually think I’m being profound. But like comparing
Bulwer-Lytton to Dickens, the first simply vomited on the page. It’s apparent
to me he was just writing.
In Dickens though, the author clearly considered every word
and while we don’t remember the entire first sentence, it left a deep enough
impact on literature to be repeatedly quoted – even in a Star Trek movie.
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