Overwriting.
Over egging the pudding.
Purple Prose.
No, not the saucy type of Purple Prose, not the raunchy stuff. What I mean is literary masturbation. The love of the sound of your own fingers on the keyboard. An orgy of metaphor and simile.
See, I’m doing it again.
It turns out that I can’t help myself. It’s such a hard thing to nail down though. Where does it stop being ‘literary’ and start being overwritten.
I had a crit from an agent a while ago and he nicknamed me Mr Metaphor.
Tim put it nicely (as he seems to do)- “Stuffing your sentence with adjectives and adjectival subclauses bogs down the pace and can end up being obfuscatory rather than making things clearer.”
Adjectives. A whole other topic. Stephen King said the road to hell was paved with adjectives and if you listen to editors nowadays you would be inclined to agree with him.
Back to overwriting. It’s something that is so hard to see in your own writing. We all love our own words. Otherwise why would we be writers? It’s hard to let go of them sometimes. Lyn Price from Behler publications (Who writes an amazing blog from the editors side of the desk) talks about the ability to kill your babies.
How do you spot which ones to kill though? Space from the project and critiquing I guess. I thought the opening of my novel was fairly taught, I’d certainly edited it a couple of times, but Tim pointed out that I’d used twelve words to describe a hand-rolled fag. Twelve words.
George Orwell wrote an essay called ‘Politics and the English Language’ in which he talks about what makes bad writing. This quote caught my eye:
“…quite apart from avoidable ugliness, two qualities are common to all of them. The first is staleness of imagery; the other is lack of precision.”
Lack of precision. That’s what overwriting is I think. A lack of precision. And that is one of the things I am going to concentrate on during my next round of rewrites.
I am going to aim to be precise in my use of words.
