Stop Overwriting Your Fiction
All of us have fallen for overwriting’s siren call. 🧜🏼♀️ We’re lured in by punching up our prose, ensuring we’re being clear and thorough in our descriptions, and doing our damnedest for readers to understand what we’re saying.
But what if I told you you’re doing too much?
Today we’re talking about…
✍🏼Less is more in fiction
🌳Allow yourself to step back and see the forest again
Don't let the details get you down or bore your readers.
✍🏼 Don’t Let Overwriting Be Your Tragic Flaw
This post isn’t to yell and shout that you’re doing fiction writing wrong.
I’m here to tell you that overwriting is one of the most common flaws found in fiction writing. And it can appear in your narrative, dialogue, action, and interiority.
If you take one thing from this post, let it be this:
More often than not, less is more. Plot, character, and world-building can come across as stronger and more effective with fewer words.
What you have to remember when the urge to overwrite, to purple up your prose, to overexplain, to over-tell comes, it’s due to two main things…
You don’t realize that readers have an innate ability to fill in the blanks.
You doubt our writing ability.
SOme Things to Keep in Mind:
1️⃣It’s okay to overwrite your first draft.
If you find it helpful to word vomit all over the page, then do it, babe. Get it all out now, but be prepared to clean it up later.
2️⃣Don’t get too attached.
Our words are precious to us, but sometimes we get too attached and they feel set in stone.
Let your first draft sit for as long as you can. The distance will allow you to be less attached to what you wrote—you’ll be able to see it with new eyes.
Which will give you the courage to 🔪brutally self-edit.
3️⃣Trust your readers.
Readers are wildly perceptive. And as writers, we tend to underestimate our readers’ ability to fill in the blanks.
Remember: Readers are smarter than you think.
If you spoon-feed them too much, you risk ruining the immersive reading experience. And sometimes, readers will even get pissed off that they’re being treated like idiots.
Now, why does this happen?
Because you’re too close to your story—you can’t see it clearly.
🌳 Step Back & See the Forest Again
Overwriting comes in many forms:
Wordiness
Vagueness
Redundancy
Convolution
Over-the-top or meaningless metaphors
You’re trying to show the reader the veins on each leaf🍂 rather than the whole forest—we lose the big picture. Put simply, it’s overwhelming. Put bluntly, your readers don’t care about each leaf.
And you might find that it’s not even fun to write.
Another reason why we overwrite is because we’re trying to sound like ‘real writers.’ But let me tell you something…
When you try to sound like a ‘real writer’, you lose your voice for something fake and unnatural. The entire point of writing your story is for it to carry your writing style.
If you haven’t found your writing style yet, that’s okay—but that’s a topic for another day.
Finding the Forest Again
Remember what I said earlier about not becoming too attached to your words?
Yeah, don’t get too attached to your words. They’re not set in stone.
We have erasers. We have the backspace key. We can put our writing in a new word document if we need to pull it out of our manuscript.
Be kind to yourself, but be a no-nonsense self-editor in revisions.
Ask yourself:
Where’s the heart of the scene?
What’s the point of the dialogue?
What’s the voice of the character?
What can I simplify?
Want to put this into practice with an editing exercise?
Head over to my Substack, Pen & Plot: Chronicles of a Fiction Editor, to learn more and put it into practice. Don’t forget to subscribe to Pen & Plot to get these writing craft deep dives and exercises delivered right to your inbox.