Quotes About Overwriting

I feel that a really public shaming or humiliation is a conflict between the person trying to write his own narrative and society trying to write a different narrative for that person. One story tries to overwrite the other and so to survive you have to own your story.

If you're trying to write about very strong horror, very strong fear or very strong emotion, it's easy to overwrite it.

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.

Attempting to read many of the works set forth as resentment's alternatives to the Canon, I reflect that these aspirants must believe they have spoken prose all their lives, or else that their sincere passions are already poems, requiring only a little overwriting.

I think the best advice I give is to try not to write. Try not to overwrite, try not to make it sound too good. Just use your own voice. Use your own style of putting it down.

Writers sometimes don't realize that an inherently dramatic tale is made even more dramatic through focus, purpose, compression, and underwriting. They often overwrite the dramatic story, which paradoxically drains it of its strength.