File Under: I Couldn't Disagree With You More

Romance Author Rebecca Brandewyne writes today on Romancing The Blog about the bad rap given to over-writing. It seems it's all an insidious plot to save paper costs.

It’s a word I see more and more with regard to fiction. I’m always amused by it. So-called clean writing actually has very little to do with good writing—and a great deal to do with saving on paper costs. Yes, as every journalism student (and I majored in journalism) knows, this entire school of thought began with newspaper publishers who wanted to squeeze as much news as they could into as few pages as possible, in order to save on paper costs and maximize profits.

How did they do it? By ruthlessly cutting words and even cutting letters, too, which is why you will often see “cigaret” nowadays instead of “cigarette,” for example. No matter how weird the former might look, the latter has two extra letters. That takes up space on paper that costs money—and all that space adds up and eats into profits. Eventually, news style manuals sprang up to keep print reporters straight about all these new rules. Print reporters were taught, as well, to use the “inverted pyramid” of who, what, where, when, why, and how—and, above all, to keep it pithy. No bloviating. When broadcast reporters came along, they got their own version of these rules: sound bites.

So when did all these rules that were originally designed to save on paper costs for newspaper publishers and maximize profits start to creep over from news reporting into the completely unrelated field of fiction? I don’t know. But I’ll bet it initially had something to do with book publishers also saving on paper costs. Thick books use more paper. They cost more to produce, which results in higher cover prices. They take up more space in a book rack than thin books do, which means you can’t get as many thick books into a book rack to sell, either.

So fiction writers, too, got a whole new set of rules.

The trouble is that fiction writers aren’t news reporters. Fiction writers are creators who build (however reality based) imaginary worlds and make things happen in them, not observers reporting on what’s happened in the real world—and the truth is that “just the facts, ma’am” is often just plain boring or worse. When was the last time you read today’s headlines for fun, entertainment, and escapism?

Here's a newspaper headline that I might find interesting and enjoyable: Romance Author Misguided, Possibly Insane. The reason over-writing and purple prose is lamentable is because it takes the reader out of the equation. It tells the reader what to feel, what to smell, and, worse, what to take emotionally from a piece of writing. When I read overly-written work, be it in print, in a workshop or even on a blog, my first thought is not that the person doing the writing is sitting at their desk and screaming along with Zack De La Rocha "Fuck you, I won't do what you told me!" to the Evil Paper Cabal that demands we remove florid writing from our pens. No, actually, I'm thinking that the person doesn't trust their reader. I'm thinking that the writer has fallen (as I certainly have been apt to do on a regular basis) in love with their own words to the exclusion of the story itself. I come from a school of thought that says one should write as evocatively as possible using as few words as possible. It doesn't always work out that way. My sense has long been that omitting useless words, parsing your sentences down to what must be there to engage the reader vs. hammering them with descriptions on top of descriptions on top of descriptions is the route to go. A wise man named Tom Filer once told a young and impetuous writer -- we'll call him Ted -- that not everything needed to described, that some things just are. It's advice I've always taken to heart. (I can also say that in all my long years on this planet as both a fiction writer and a journalist, that no one has ever pulled me aside and said, "Yeah, see we need to cut this sentence down because of the paper industry. Yeah, sorry dude, but they just aren't producing pulp like they used to, so no more adverbs." But plenty of my editors have said, "Tod, we get that you have a false sense of erudition, but the rest of the world doesn't need to know it. Is there an easier way to say this?")

What also offends me about Ms. Brandewyne's column is that she's writing in a space where I'm aware aspiring writers often visit. Go ahead and write descriptive sentences and create lush worlds, I'm not complaining about that, but don't read her bit and decide that every word in your novel needs to be trumped up with 200 more words describing it.

Comments

[rob roberge]

I read this whole post aloud to Gayle who said, "That woman's just wrong. And crazy."

2 votes here for wrong and crazy.

[Keith]

I understand one reason for the journalistic style of dropping the final serial comma is reduction in ink (not paper) expenses, but the rest of her theory is... a little odd. I wonder who told her all that.

[Adam]

"Tod, we get that you have a false sense of erudition ..."

That's the funniest thing I've read in three and a half weeks. I'm editing a manuscript of my own at the moment, and finding lapidary phrases of art and imagination: "Adam, we get that you're a wannabe Faulkner, but you're actually shooting for Dean Koontz, here ... and missing."

[Josh Maday]

Excellent post, Tod. Who cares why conciseness came into fashion (with most people)? It's better, and that's it. This post explains why Matt Bell and I started writing 100 word microfictions everyday and posting them at www.dancingonflyash.com. The ability to trim excess verbage is a necessity.

[Diana]

I normally skip through long drawn out descriptions unless it helps me to understand better about the characters or scenery. I like to just get to the meat of the story. I don't need to know every last detail of character's appearance. I agree with you. When writers over-write, it seems to me like they are in love with their own writing.:)