Pretentious Overwriting

Who’s guilty of pretentious overwriting?

(Not this man, that’s for sure!)

• Ernest Hemingway.
• Photograph’s original source: George Kargar, Time Life, Getty

A review of a Dean Koontz book the other day accused Koontz of pretentious overwriting, but concluded that the book was still worth a shot - especially for fans of the great man.

I have to confess that I do agree with the reviewer. I’ve read loads of Koontz books, and he certainly can overwrite a scene. His weather personifications can be particularly heavy-handed. Yet he does manage to carry it all off with a deft touch. His characters (well, the good guys) are always sympathetic and their banter can be funny. His villains are reliably deplorable, and his stories - despite the overwriting - move along at a fair clip.

So who else is guilty of “pretentious overwriting”? If we presume that great authors (Charles Dickens et al) are not pretentious because all later authors have pretensions to write like them, the list is, I’m sure, huge. To some extent, pretentious overwriting is the author playing with language, trying to find as many different ways as possible of connecting words within sentences: Guy Gavriel Kay, China Mieville, probably any writer who has ever used a simile, metaphor, adverb or adjective. Anyone who isn’t Ernest Hemingway or Elmore Leonard, in other words.   

But surely we should want writers to be bold, to not all try to imitate Cormac McCarthy. Fiction writing records explorations into the imagination. Some writers might see a series of hard nouns: pebbles in a stream, as Hemmingway once said. Others don’t. They see ethereal, hazy images: shimming iridescence trickling over rainbow rocks. Personally, I see pebbles in a stream, but I’m glad other writers see differently.

What writers do have to be careful is pretentious underediting, however. By all means, write the descriptions and convoluted character introspection. But don’t let it obstruct the story, the race to the last page. Upstairs, I have 950 A5 notebook pages of the first draft of a chess novel waiting to be culled. When I’ve typed it up, I hope it will be 350 A4 pages. And when it’s edited and proofed to the nth degree, I’m aiming for 250 pages. Somehow, I doubt there’ll be any room for weather personification.

Tags: writers

This entry was posted on Monday, February 28th, 2011 at 8:18 pm and is filed under Short Story. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.