Three Examples of Overdoing it in Writing

When I was younger, a coworker and I had to move some boxes, and it looked like we might have to make two trips. I tripled my load and told him that I thought we could do the whole thing in one round. As I stood there, clearly overloaded and straining, he looked at me and said, “Yeah, but you’ll look like a dumba$@.”

He was right, and we ended up taking two trips. I think of this story often because as writers, we can find ourselves trying to do too much. Here are three examples with their own movie references.

1. Overcompensating

Being provocative or vulnerable in your writing can be uncomfortable and prompt you to overexplain your reasoning or feelings. If you write a sentence and then feel the need to follow it up with a paragraph of caveats, there is no shame or harm in deciding you are not ready to put that thought on paper. Otherwise, you might feel like Mike (Jon Favreau) calling Nikki’s answering machine in Swingers.

2. Throwing in Everything

This can often happen when writing by committee, where everyone has an idea of what should be said, but putting it all together makes little sense. The result can often be a Franken-piece. Some of the worst superhero movies have this same feel. While you cannot keep people from being who they are, the best thing you can do when you fear that your coworkers want to do too much is to flag it on the front end. They may still have you do it anyway, but at least you will know that you did what you could to prevent the office equivalent of Batman v Superman: Dawn of Justice.

3. Too Much Exposition

Several years ago, I wrote an article for the boxing website The Sweet Science about the super middleweight division in the late 1980s. The piece was a dense recap of boxers and fight results that my editor did not particularly like. When I asked my brother what he thought, he said, “Do you remember that scene in the Naked Gun 2½ where they keep naming a bunch of boxers?” You don’t want your writing to conjure up memories of that.

Even today, there are still moments when I find myself doing one of these three things. When you realize you are too, my advice is to look at where you started trying to do too much and delete everything after it. Starting over may seem daunting, but it will not take as long as reworking several paragraphs of bad writing.

If you enjoyed this piece, you might also like my earlier blog on Understanding Both sides for your writing.

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