I don't trust myself enough. When I write, I overwrite. Gingerbread. Too much gingerbread. Writing is probably the only hobby I have. But I wish I had another one. If I was just a little better at golf.
I have written too much about lives - I feel I have lived for too long.
After so many books and so many years of writing, I have a good idea of my strengths and weaknesses. I love the process of writing and, if I allowed myself, I would write far too much every day. One weakness which I've struggled to overcome is my tendency to having my characters ruminate for pages.
Writing is a hard gig, and it's hard to convey a lot. That's why scripts tend to be a little bit overwritten.
What writes worse than a Theodore Dreiser? ... Two Theodore Dreisers.
You come by your style by learning what to leave out. At first you tend to overwrite—embellishment instead of insight. You either continue to write puerile bilge, or you change. In the process of simplifying oneself, one often discovers the thing called voice.
My first draft is always way too long; my books start out with delusions of 'War and Peace' - and must be gently disabused. My editor is brilliant at taking me to the point where I do all the necessary cutting on my own. I like to say she's a midwife rather than a surgeon.
My first book is really comparable to what I do now, where it's pretty surreal and strange at moments, but that being my first book - I wrote that when I was 22; it came out when I was 24 - and it was just really overwritten. I just didn't trust myself as a writer to say something once.
I think writing is a part-time career, because otherwise you get a little stale, maybe even self-indulgent, when you have to fill the hours with sentences. I don't think, if I wrote 12 hours a day, my work would be much better.
I tend to overwrite; I need a good editor.
For once the disease of reading has laid upon the system it weakens so that it falls an easy prey to that other scourge which dwells in the ink pot and festers in the quill. The wretch takes to writing.
If you are having trouble with a story, it may not be an issue with the quality of the writing - there may just be too much of it.
Adverbs lead to overwriting. Try taking them out and reading your prose again to see how it sounds. Simple and less words are more powerful.
There's one massive problem with coming from writing novels into screenplays that I've discovered over the years, which is that you've got too much facility on the page.
What's left is palimpsest—one memory bleeding into another, overwriting it.
The tendency when you dictate is to overwrite, because you're not counting pages, you don't really know what the hell the page count is.
During my last year of college I wrote the same ten pages over and over again. Those ten pages became the first few pages of my first novel. I can still recite the opening paragraph from memory - only now I cringe when I do it because they are - surprise! - a classic example of overwriting, in addition to being a more than a little pretentious.
Once, I thought I had a novel, and it turned out it was only a short story. I wrote about 800 pages, but it ended up being a short story. And if it ever happens to me again, I Will Go Insane.
If you're trying to write about very strong horror, very strong fear or very strong emotion, it's easy to overwrite it.
One tends to write beyond what's needed.
After all, it is a common weakness of young authors to put too much into their papers.
When I feel I'm repeating myself, I'll probably pack it in. What will undoubtedly happen is I'll write one too many. The important thing is to recognize when you've written too many and stop there.
When writing becomes too dominant, it gets leached of its own power. We spend more and more time writing and we have less and less to write about.
