Episode 50: How do you deal with under- and over-writing?

In this week’s episode, JP and Crys talk all about under- and over-writing. They discuss how this varies across genres and specific ways they find themselves doing both.

Show Notes

Wide for the Win by Mark Leslie Lefebvre

How to Write Manga Your Complete Guide to the Secrets of Japanese Comic Book Storytelling by RA Patterson

Patreon

Leave a comment

Transcript

JP: Hello, friends. This is episode number 50 of the Write Away Podcast, and it is the 29th of June as we are recording. I’m JP Rindfleisch with my co-host…

Crys: Crys Cain.

JP: Hello, Crys. How has your writing week been?

Crys: It’s been meh, I got sick. JP’s never going to let me live this down. I commented on a short story of his and because I was working from my phone, it was over the weekend, I had my kid and I was just like working on my phone. Occasionally my phone slips into all caps and then one time I left him a comment that was just LER, L-E-R in all caps. That’s all. That’s it.

JP: I just assumed it meant blah. And then moved on. Yeah.

Crys: Appropriate assumption, I think. So I got sick, I had like a head cold, but I’m such a baby with head colds. It just stops my brain. I can’t think.

So not a lot done last week. I got quite a bit done in not writing yesterday. I decided last month, I think, I don’t know, I decided recently that my first series under my current pen name and the romance had dropped to a monthly income level where I had a while ago, maybe a year or so ago said, when it drops below that amount, I will consider taking it wide. And it did. And I was like, oh, I’m just going to take it wide. I’m not going to dither about whether it’s the best decision or not. I’m just going to do it because I do want to start building a wide presence with this pen name so I can set it and forget it once I’m done.

So I spent quite a bit of time in the morning reformatting my back matter. And I shared with The Author Success Mastermind that were part of like my kind of checklist of all the things that I did. I verified that had all of the covers that I needed. I have a checklist for my assistant like, hey, here’s the sites that we need to upload.

I realized that I’m part of PublishDrive’s like old program where you didn’t have to pay monthly. And I haven’t had to think about that cause I haven’t put anything wide in over a year and I have only ever made like $62 from them in the two years I’ve been with them, but still.

JP: Definitely really nice to realize, oh, I have a lifetime membership to this.

Crys: Ha, sign up for everything folks, just in case you might get freebied later on.

JP: I’m not going to lie, if I see like lifetime membership to something and I have the ability, I always get it. Just in case

Crys: Yeah, if it’s not too expensive.

JP: Oh yeah. Like I’m not gonna break the bank.

Crys: How about you?

JP: It’s been interesting. So the past two weeks or so I’ve been racing to get this short story, and just for fun, just trying to get it to a place where I can submit it. And then luckily you were kind enough to just be a second set of eyes on it.

Crys: To be an asshole.

JP: You were not, you were exactly what I needed.

Yeah. And so I am under 24 hours away from submitting it, and I just have one little thing to do, so yeah, I’m really happy that I was able to get it through to place where I really liked the story, personally. And I’m really happy to submit it and be like, here you go.

I don’t know what will happen, but here.

Crys: And this, for folks who are wondering, is the story from the tarot episodes, like how to write a short story with tarot. I have not finished mine. I started it however, and I feel very proud of that accomplishment.

JP: It’s all good. As long as one of us submits it, we’re fine.

Crys: We went in together. Yes.

JP: This was a joint effort. And then because of course I am apparently prone to injury… let’s see, last week I injured my knee, this week I decided that my finger needed to go into a window.

Crys: This was not dancing. This is not dancing-involved.

JP: Yeah, so my little pinky finger looks like I painted black nail polish on it, which I did not. And my ring finger on my left hand quickly learned how to be a pinky finger as well for typing. Cause I cannot type with it.

Crys: The other thing that I feel I need to note about the week is that yesterday my phone decided it was no longer going to charge. This is my third phone of the year. We’re in June. I am still fighting with customs over the two replacement phones that I ordered. I think they’ll actually approve it this week while I am gone.

So I have to see if they will put a friend’s name on my package so that they have the authority to pick it up. Because it is ridiculous, this is ridiculous. To the point where I have just asked JP, can I ship you a phone so that while I’m in the States I have a phone.

JP: I don’t know what to do with you.

Crys: Two or three years ago I had a lady and she was an energy worker. She was like, she saw a ghost, and she goes, I think you have a tech demon on your shoulder. He’s male, because of course he is, he has a male energy.

And do you mind if I like try it? I was like, yes, please try and get them off. I think she just pissed him off.

JP: I don’t think it worked. So hide your phone. Hide your tablets.

Crys: If anything happens to this computer, but this computer is new too. Anyways. Anyways. All right. So we have a topic that isn’t my tech problems this week.

Oh. We have other things to do before that. Excellent. Yes.

JP: Yes. So before that, we do have a new Patreon subscriber.

Crys: Yay. Jimmy. Thanks, Jimmy!

JP: Thank you very much, Jimmy.

 Thank you very much. And we also have comments. Yay. So on our Episode 48, How Do You Write Scenes And Chapters? we have a comment from Lon, our good friend, who wanted to ensure us that he is not a wonderful human, just seven goblins in a trench coat, which, okay, that’s fair.

Crys: I met him in person. I can attest that he is at least half human.

JP: At least half human or has really good disguise for seven goblins. I’m impressed. But yeah, he just talks about how he goes into how we write scenes. Either using soft breaks, hard breaks, or chapter breaks, and that he doesn’t have a word length or page length setting this up, then used a reference, and unfortunately I have no reference for it because I will attest that I am young, even though I am not. Yeah, so that was our comment.

Crys:  We also had a comment from Kim who said that the conversation about scenes and chapters totally shook something loose for her. She’d been struggling with a particular chapter at the end of act two in a novel she’s revising, now she has a page of notes on how to fix it. It was the discussion about the action reaction scenes and the shift in mood that did it. So that was super exciting.

JP: Woo.

Crys: Yes. Okay. Now we’re talking about underwriting and overwriting. JP, which would you say that you are? Are you an underwriter or an overwriter?

Cause I know you’re not perfect.

JP: I know I’m not perfect. So I actually had to think about what I was. And I think more recently what I’ve realized is that in the first set of drafting, I underwrite egregiously. And now, especially when I do dialogue-first writing, it’s very underwritten.

But then the second time through which I personally still, like in my mind, it’s still considered a first draft, but I know it’s not. I then actually overwrite, so I almost let it overcompensate and then I’m just very verbose. So I think if I wanted to say, I would say first drafting, technically I overwrite.

How about you?

Crys: When I was younger and more playful, I was far more of an overwriter. The pain of losing pages and pages of stuff that was not pertinent turned me into an underwriter, a chronic underwriter. And now, at least with the romance, I tend to be a one, like write it and done. Like my co-writer and I give each other a pass to flesh out anything that we think might be added, but it’s rarely more than like a paragraph added. Sometimes it’s just a line here, a line there, some snappy dialogue, a bit of description, but that energy style is pretty solidified.

Because I haven’t written anything outside of romance in a long time. I’m actually not quite sure where I truly fall. I feel like I still fall under the underwriting, and the reason why is because I don’t often pay attention to setting and mood as much on that first draft, because I’m focusing so much on the characters. And setting and description, like you can be a sparce writer, but I don’t put in enough of the pertinent details in those elements.

One of the comments that I got so consistently when I was in a writer’s group in Nashville was I really want more, I want to be able to see the scene. And a lot of that was because I was writing fantasy. And so when you’re writing fantasy, that’s part of the draw is you want far more description than if you’re writing, I don’t know, I’m trying to think of an example of something, like a legal thriller. I don’t care what your briefcase looks like, sir. Unless it’s really fancy and hides the knife. I don’t know. I don’t know why you’d be hiding a knife in a legal thriller, but anyways there’s a genre expectation of levels of kinds of writing, not even levels, but levels of description, how much you use.

And because I tend to write in genres that have heavy world-building, I am an underwriter. Whereas in a different genre that I wouldn’t enjoy as much, I wouldn’t necessarily be in those ways. Might be an underwriter in completely different ways.

JP: Yeah. A lot of that makes sense based off of genres.

When you’re talking about a legal thriller, half of those things don’t need any further description than a brown briefcase, unless there’s a story behind it. 

Crys: Papers were legal sized.  They were white. The ink was black, assumed. These are all assumed. And now it’s probably digital.

JP: But yeah. Then when you start adding any sort of strangeness or anything that makes it unfamiliar or surreal, that’s when you almost have to go into detail. It’s a leather briefcase that’s now made of dragon hide, or it holds more than it should be able to, or things along those lines, you need to go into more detail to bring your reader up to speed onto what your world is.

So I think that’s definitely part of the level of how genre expectation fits into overwriting.

Crys: Now I would challenge you on your description of overwriting given that I finally got to read something you wrote. And because I don’t think that you’re an overwriter. You use extraneous words, yes. I don’t actually think that’s overwriting. I think that is just part of writing. And when I’m saying like the use of extraneous words, this is something I’m extremely guilty of. He looked at the pot. He stood and walked, like just a lot of the movement things that sometimes we writers need to put there so that we can visualize the scene.

 But then when we go through, hopefully like after we’ve had some time to take a deep breath and be like, okay. After you’ve had time to let it sit, it’s a lot easier to do this and read through and see which of those stage directions is necessary and which isn’t. This is actually something that I’ve been paying a lot of attention to right now, particularly in listening to books because I’m curious, what about the books that I really enjoy that I feel like really just pull me in, stick me there, submerse me, how do they balance it so that I don’t notice it. That’s something that I’m looking at a lot. I mentioned that in the Weekend Reads this Saturday, that was something that I’m looking at. And so I think that was why it was on my mind a lot as I was reading through your stuff and just like crossing things out.

JP: Yeah. It’s one of those things that like you do until someone points it out and then you’re like, oh no. Because for me I don’t like dialogue tags at all. So I always, when I write, I always do action and dialogue, regardless of if that action is ‘he looked at the pot,’ but that’s my way of telling myself who is about to speak.

So it was really good that you pointed those out because I still may not go back into dialogue tags, but I know that I need something else there, that I need something that’s not extraneous, that’s not just a stage direction. But if my intent is action and then dialogue, make the action just as valid as the dialogue.

Crys: Yeah. I lean heavily towards action tags as well, but I do use dialogue tags when they’re necessary. Particularly when there are a lot of people in a fast-paced conversation, often then it is more advantageous to use dialogue tags versus slowing the conversation down by having everybody do something before they speak.

JP: Yeah. So I don’t know what it is. I don’t know why I hate it so much.

Crys: Cause we’d been taught like, don’t you saidisms, and then don’t overwhelm your readers with saying said all the time. A lot of rules are just like, well I’m not going to use them, they’re hard. Sometimes it happens.

But leaning on dialogue tags helps keep a lot of pace, but it isn’t the only tool we have. so like the other level of overwriting and the one that I think is harder for people to deal with is where you are or writing super extra information, or like trailing off onsite trails that you don’t necessarily need.

This can make it really hard in the editing stage because you have to go through and pick out the core of what you’re trying to say, but it’s not necessarily problematic because you have a lot of material to work with. Whereas underwriters are more building up the architecture as they go through additive construction. Overwriters are like grabbing at a giant lump of clay and then carving things away. So we both still end up with beautiful things, just completely different ways of going about it.

Do you need to fix your overwriting or underwriting? Nah, honestly, as long as you’re getting stuff done and it’s not painful for you, absolutely not. The benefit that overwriters have is that they then have material that they can spin off into short stories. If you’re an overwriter with descriptions and such, you might actually just need that to get the story and the place visual for you so that you can write the story that you need to.

I often write a whole bunch of crap that happens before the scene that needs to happen happens. Particularly when I’m just writing a scene or I’m writing a short story, I will often write the scene that happens before the story actually starts because I am like what got us to this point? And then I ditch that first scene.

JP: Yeah, that makes sense. And then I also can see overwriting coming into play with like info dumping, which was something I’d been working on with some of the edits for our book, because we have scenes where either a certain character is basically a teacher and they’re giving a lesson or some type of speech and that information needs to come across.

I think the key for us, or the key that you especially brought to my attention was like, what does your main character, your protagonist of this scene, what do they want? Because it may not align with what they’re being taught and that you can interplay the two and it comes into removing chunks of the actual lesson being taught because the main character may not care or may not want that information.

They may be trying to divert the conversation to something they want to talk about. And I think keeping in mind, like when you get into stages of overwriting, that someone is telling you, Hey, this is a little boring, or this is a little slow, that may be just the time to look at what your main character wants in that scene and see if you can interplay with that to alter it.

Crys: I think the main thing to keep in mind is that as long as you aren’t really annoyed or in pain because of however you’re writing your first drafting style is, it’s just a part of the process. Whether you’re an underwriter or an overwriter, you just need to know what the next step of your process is. Do you carve things out? Now, can you absolutely improve so that you overwrite less or you underwrite less? Absolutely. I feel like I’ve done that with romance. I have learned, this is one of my focuses throughout the last four years, I’ve learned how to pull in the emotional beats far more easily than when I first started. I was far more plot oriented when I started and just figuring out how to tell a story.

And now that I’ve learned to tell this kind of story, I know what kind of emotions and how to draw them out. And so I’ve learned to be a more fully fleshed writer in this realm. So that’s just part of the growth process, learning which things you chronically have to add and deciding whether you want to learn to add them first drafting, or at least add them a bit more, or if you’re just comfortable with that and then want to add that on a next pass. Or if you’re an overwriter, learning which things you chronically remove and figuring out if that’s something you want to catch early on, or can catch early on, or if that is just something that you need to catch in a later pass.

JP: I think when it comes to underwriting, because now that you mentioned that I have some underwriter tendencies, I’m thinking about it. A big thing was descriptions. A lot of the times I’ll run into floating head syndrome, where I’m just like explaining the action as it takes place, but at no point am I pausing to give the reader what I’m picturing in my head. What are the five senses that the main character is experiencing? Because a lot of the time I will either focus on hearing or sight, but I may not focus on three, potentially. Like what does it smell like in this area? Or something that kind of like anchors it down for the reader a little bit more.

And then another thing too was pacing. There was a couple of times that you highlighted in the short story that I was writing, sit in this moment and draw this moment out because I want to feel a little bit more here. And all it took was like another sentence, but it was long enough that it shifted the pacing and let you as the reader breathe in that moment and feel what they felt until we moved on.

So I can definitely see those parts for underwriters, that they may have to go back through and have a little checklist. Am I hitting all the five senses or am I hitting like three of five or something like that? And then the moments that I want to cherish to hit those beats, am I drawing that out long enough?

Crys: Yeah. Are there any other points that come to mind that you want to bring up before we wrap?

JP: I don’t think so. We are not over nor under.

Crys:  We are perfection as podcasting. My question for our listeners this week is: Do you feel you’re more of an overwriter, underwriter, or you think you’re perfect? Because if you’re perfect, then we want to laugh at you or with you, whatever.

JP: Maybe you are perfect.

Crys: Anyways, JP loves you more than I do. If you would like to join us on our Patreon, you’ll be able to jump into our live stream book club this month, as well as listen to our Year of Tarot exclusive podcasts, the latest which we recorded right before this episode.

So we will be traveling this week. We’re going to see each other in real life for the first time. So excited. JP is terrified. I’m excited.

JP: Our next book will be Wide for the Win written by Mark Leslie Lefebvre.

And we had a poll up for our August 2021 Book Club in Patreon, and it looks like it will be How to Write Manga Your Complete Guide to the Secrets of Japanese Comic Book Storytelling by RA Patterson.

Crys: So that’ll be August.  I’m excited. All right, friends. We’ll have links to where you can leave your comment and the Patreon in the show notes.

So we’ll see you next week.

JP: See you later.