Weakness

I love doing NaNoWriMo. I've got three wins under my belt so far and I intend to participate again this year. It's taught me how to focus on my writing while I'm sitting at the computer and how to work through writer's block.

It's also given me a terribly bad habit: over-writing. As I work away at streamlining the third draft of a story that will see publication before too long I am painfully aware that even though I do not use a lot of adverbs, I spend a lot of time describing actions that are unnecessary and take the reader out of the story. At the same time, I do not describe enough of the setting, though, allowing the reader to dive into the story.

There's no blame to be assigned to NaNo, none at all. This is part of the learning curve I have to get past. It's happening because there are some very good people behind me taking the time to teach me. Every writer has a weakness, this one is mine. I suspect that it's a weakness that a lot of writers share, but I wonder how many realize it? I'm one to offer advice when I'm asked and in this case I advise you, if you're a writer, to ask your readers if there could be more economy of words in your work. Can you make it snappier, read faster and still tell the story?

Sure you can. For my own part, I will do my best to work away at trimming as I write. Will you?