Many years ago—long before my editing days—I was reading my hot-off-the-press copy of Pat Conroy’s The Prince of Tides. (Before lights out, in bed, where I still do my pleasure reading.) There was one paragraph (among many) that was so exquisite, so perfect, that I threw the book across the room in despair. (I’m not proud of this. But.) I was, at the time, trying to write a novel myself (an endeavor I knew absolutely nothing about), and I was certain I could never emulate what I’d just read.

Oh, I loved Conroy’s work. My mother had given me a copy of The Water Is Wide when the movie based on it (Conrack) came out. I grew up in a military family, the daughter of a USAF pilot, so The Great Santini was essential reading in our house.* The Lords of Discipline followed, and it shocked my young self—in a good way—but forever colored what I think of the Citadel. I was familiar with the milieu (my family goes ’way back in South Carolina); Pat Conroy spoke a language I knew in my bones.

Eventually I fell away from Pat, moved on to other authors, other interests.** He wrote a spirited defense of English teachers in 2007, but I’d passed on the 800-page Beach Music in ’95, having read reviews that suggested it was bloated. (In fact, Wikipedia reports he submitted 2,100 typewritten pages to his editor, who trimmed it significantly.***) Reviews were mixed for South of Broad too.

Then I was directed to his 2010 memoir, My Reading Life, which I am enjoying, yes, but also cringing a little over. It’s exposing both Pat’s writing gifts and his writing flaws. It occurs to me that we can learn something from the flaws of a best-selling author—so let’s talk about overwriting.

What is overwriting? Simply: writing that is too elaborate, too ornate, too wordy, too much in every way. (This is a really great article about it.) It can be a lot like purple prose—it might make use of purple prose—but that’s really just the beginning; artificial springs to mind, along with repetitious, convoluted, overloaded, overexplained. Overwriting is prose that is melodramatic, schmaltzy, florid, and overwrought—all words I’ve seen used in reviews of Pat Conroy’s work.

Maybe it’s just better if I give you an example, just one paragraph, transcribed by me from page 84 of my copy of My Reading Life:

I grew up a word-haunted boy. I felt words inside me and stored them wondrous as pearls. I mouthed them and fingered them and rolled them around my tongue. My mother filled my bedtime hour with poetry that rang like Sanctus bells as she praised the ineffable loveliness of the English language with her Georgia-accented voice. I found that hive of words beautiful beyond all conveyance. They clung to me and blistered my skin and made me happy to be alive in the land of crape myrtle, spot-tailed bass, and eastern diamondbacks. The precise naming of things served as my entryway into art. The whole world could be sounded out. I could arrange each day into a tear sheet of music composed of words as pretty as flutes or the tail feathers of peacocks.

In this 134-word paragraph we move from haunting to pearls to poetry to bells to a hive to blistered skin to art and music. And that’s just the imagery. It’s not connected, it doesn’t flow, it’s over-the-top, frankly. I read it a few days ago and though I don’t wear my editor hat during pleasure reading, my first thought was What in the world happened to this mess? (Forgive me, Pat,**** but it’s true. This paragraph makes very little sense. You are trying too hard.)

If you’ve gotten editorial notes from me in which I’ve told you to Relax, you’re trying too hard … you’re overwriting. You’re overworking. If you find yourself in this situation, stop, drop, and simplify. 🙂

Was Conroy always this full of himself, always this bombastic? Or was his earlier work more finely crafted (or less crafted, to its benefit)? I don’t know, and I haven’t read those early books in decades. Yet I see sparks of the Conroy I loved in little gems like this sentence from page 114:

In the early days, Cliff treated me with all the suspicion of a trapdoor spider.

If you’ve watched as much science TV as I did with the Boy, you know it’s perfectly visualized.

There’s lots more you can learn too. Conroy was a great teller of stories with complex plots that always satisfy. His voice was powerful and self-assured—and that was because he absolutely and always wrote what he knew: he mined his own personal life—its tragedies and triumphs, his family, his school, his locations—for every book he ever wrote. “Write what you know” is a simple dictum, but it’s often misunderstood. Conroy understood it completely.

Pat Conroy wrote movingly about the military “brat” subculture; he supported research and the awareness movement. The children of career military families live lives so different from other children it’s almost impossible to describe. The constant moving alone means they never have a hometown. Pat understood the sacrifices of the children—and he didn’t pull any punches when he wrote about it.

I forgive Pat the paragraph above, I do. And you writers can learn from it. At its best, his prose is lyrical and beautiful. At its worst—well, there are all those New York Times best-selling books to answer that. I imagine that he wasn’t easy to edit in his latter years. (If you’re a fan of those works, let me hear from you, please.) And as always, I believe we can learn a lot by reading other writers. Pat Conroy is no exception.

* I want to note emphatically that my daddy was great in every sense of the word but he was never, ever like Bull Meacham.
** I did read his memoir My Losing Season when it came out in 2002.
*** Manuscript pages have fewer words than printed pages in the book, but still, 2,100 pages is a lot. For comparison, the longest manuscript I’ve ever worked on was a little over 500 pages.
**** Sadly, Mr. Conroy left this world on 4 March 2016.

Tweet: Overwriting: too elaborate, too ornate, too wordy, too much in every way.
Tweet: Overwriting—relax, you’re trying too hard.

Disclosure of Material Connection: I have not received any compensation for writing this post. I have no material connection to the brands, products, or services that I have mentioned. I am disclosing this in accordance with the Federal Trade Commission’s 16 CFR, Part 255: “Guides Concerning the Use of Endorsements and Testimonials in Advertising.”