Woes of an Underwriter

There are skeletons in my mind

Time and time again, posts about trimming down the manuscripts pop up on every social media. Writers who struggle to stop, who just keep going and going and going until their draft has 150k words and they are only half way through the intended story. And then they lament online about how they have to cut out so many words, possibly to fit in some quota decided by the publishing industry.

The very publishing industry that is basically an artsy circle jerk of people in New York whose noses tear the sky apart.

The very publishing industry which operates on word count limits, despite the fact we’re not living in the 19th century and e-books exist. E-books should have been an overwriter’s dream come true! You can write and write and write tens of thousands of words, and you can publish it without expensive paper printing. I do wonder how the classics from yesteryear would’ve been written if e-books existed back then. It could be a reader problem, wherein if they see 200k words, they likely won’t take it up, but will happily read 109 volumes of manga. People won’t watch a movie, but will binge watch a season. And yet, the voracious reader does not look at word count. And yet, the agents are scared and limiting.

Even here on Substack, people write a lot of words, and I mean a lot of words that ultimately don’t really say anything, or are just repeats of previous sentences. I’ve read word salad odes to very mundane feelings and ideas on here, like the whole discourse about having children which, for me, culminated after reading a 10 000 word essay explaining in great detail and verbosity how population decline is harming the world, only for it to end with “Women need to be removed from education, here’s a bullet point list why”. What’s with the buffer zone beforehand, if that’s the conclusion?

Now, I come from a journalist background; specifically daily news reporter. My words are usually straight to the point, without any fluff. Who, what, where, when, why. Therefore, I am a chronic underwriter. My first, and second, and third drafts are hungry skeletons with no meat or even tendons on them. For comparison and transparency, here are the first and final draft of a scene in my latest story In Utero.

First draft on the left, third and published draft on the right.

84 words // 261 words

The scene is the same, but even just visually, that’s a big difference.And this is something I struggle with a lot. If let be, my stories would just be micro fiction, and yet that is a format that I could not really do properly. Perhaps it is an issue of years of journalism that pounded into me to capture the very essence of the problem / idea / concept / news, and let the details out the window. Perhaps I am simply too impatient to get the story out of my head. Or too eager. Or too robotic.

So to combat this, to overcome my weakness, there are two things I decided to do.

One, I will write a vivid poem every day before working on my novel, to warm up my brain, to let the creativity flow and to cast away the cringe I feel when I feel like I’m overexplaining, but I’m actually not.
Two, I am reading Dostoevsky.

Will make a separate post in the future about how my battle plan is going.

Lastly, a confession.
I am jealous of the overwriter. I wish I could trim away the excess fat, instead of trying to put anything on the skeleton and make it stick to the bone. The process of deleting is much easier than the process of adding. And adding more. And more… Fingers crossed that this works. Otherwise, I’ll have to keep reading 19th century Russians.

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