About Getting Bloated
Post 877:
I’ve got a friend who says he doesn’t feel satisfied from a meal unless he feels sickeningly full, engorged to the point of a problem. It’s one of my favorite things ever—it’s such a perfect way and honest way to describe a “zealous appreciation for food.”
You know the feeling he’s talking about, I assume. The one where you need to undo the top button of your pants, where things that smelled really appetizing two minutes ago make you nauseous. Your belly’s distended like the first guy murdered in Se7en for a rather on-the-nose mortal lesson in gluttony.
Being that full is super fun and awesome. And we can all agree that my statements heretofore establish that it’s wholesome and American.
Then there’s bloated writing. Oh no. We were having such a good time.
Bloated writing is the worst. It’s not American and should be illegal.
A lot of people get confused on the subject of overwriting, thinking that saying a lot means writing a lot. Sometimes, but it’s more complicated from where I sit. The default setting should be saying a lot and writing as little as possible.
When I first started trying to get good with words, I figured I had to write a million lines about every single thing going on in my stories. Look at all the great books. A lot of them are frigging huge. Some of the best works weigh a ton. They could be used as weapons of war. From Tolstoy to Tom Wolfe to Stephen King, the examples are there to draw from.
Couple things. Those guys are incredibly famous and got to do whatever they wanted. Tolstoy wrote Anna Karenina or War and Peace 67 times before getting it right, and you know what he was doing, besides going partially insane? You guessed it. He was taking out words. He was stumbling around vodka-addled in one of those Russian lace-up shirts and no underwear, growing a wicked Russian beard and throwing pages into the fire and yelling at servants. I’m assuming.
He was a genius and a lunatic. The idea of bloat was despicable. That’s why he kept his books to a tight 1000 pages or whatever. And here’s the magic deal. They’re good reading. The fat is trimmed, the gristle is gone. Other meat metaphors.
Too much is subjective, of course. Some good writers fall for the art of description and setting more than others. All that stuff is arguable. But whatever’s on the page needs to be there for a reason. It should be hard for anything to make the cut. The color of the protagonist’s wallpaper ain’t keeping me around if the story mostly takes place in the jungle. People’s interest is a precious thing.
I can see the other side. Not doing enough can be a problem, but if you’re going to make an error (and you will) I think it’s the way to go. Not enough means the reader can fill in the gaps with their own imagination. It’s all about trust, man. Leaving them wanting is better than leaving them bored to balls.
I’ll give you examples of too much outside the writing game to make my point. Here goes. Texting all the time. Talking about yourself a ton. Getting into MMA to where you think you might want to try it as a way to expand your horizons. Believing people on TV to the point where you think they actually care about you. Spending thousands of hours trying to figure out what went wrong with Star Wars. Taking a bunch of pictures of yourself in the mirror, where now you have a certain place you stand in the bathroom.
Flip that around.
Let’s compare that to not enough. What you’ve got there is a seldom texting-selfless-casual MMA fan. A take it with a grain of salt, fan of old school Star Wars who can go days without seeing their own image and actually prefers not to, on account of having other things to do with their lives. That’s who I’m talking about.
A little goes a long way. If you’ll excuse me, I’m going to go eat until I’m sick. In the end, you’ve got to do what makes you happy.
Cheers and see you after.
