Craft Chat Are you overwriting? I'm guilty.

[RK Wallis]

I never understood what critiquers were feeling when they said they felt something was overwritten, but now I get it.

First, because my last novels came out naturally and fast, especially the last. Of course, further rewrites are necessary, but the flow is there from the start.

Second, because this blog post makes complete sense, and is a good perspective on how to think of the reader. I'd never thought of what readers hear, even though I always strive to think of them first:

Don't over-engineer how the reader "hears" your words

The best books are ones that disappear in our hands. When we’re reading a novel we love, we enter a fugue state and can’t turn the pages fast enough. The outside world disappears, and we get lost in lands we would never otherwise explore. But we can’t get into that flow if the hand of […]

nathanbransford.com

 

[Sedayne]

When I first saw the title of the thread, I thought, I'm such an overwriter because my word counts are high and I have to edit down a lot. But that not what he means here.

I am happy to discover I'm not especially guilty of the things Nathan Bransford calls out. Ellipses and italics for emphasis are two of my biggest bugbears. I hate being told how to hear something.

This is a great blog post packed with sound advice.

 

[Sedayne]

Although, I do like ellipses used sparingly in the way they are intended to be used: for omission or at the end of trailing off dialogue. (When writers use them for dramatic pauses, I get confused and try to work out which words have been omitted only to find there aren't any.)