I promise this is about writing, but first I’m going to tell you a story. I was driving home yesterday, so I went to McDonald’s to get a Sprite and french fries. There was no ketchup in the bag, so I asked for some. I specifically remember saying “Can I get some ketchup? Just one is fine.” But instead of getting what I asked for, which would have been nice, I got 15 packets of ketchup. I am not joking. I’m sure that she knew she only gave me a medium order of fries, but for some reason she felt the need to hand me two handfuls of ketchup packets so large they were falling to the ground as the held them out the window. So this is what I like to call overcompensation.It happens in restaurants, like I mentioned above, but it also happens in writing.
Overcompensation comes up when you realize a deficit of some kind. You discover you have no characterization, for instance, or no ketchup. For some reason, the automatic reaction to this deficit is to insert more of whatever was missing to make up for the initial lack of it. In most cases, this is bad.
My problem is that I like to focus on characters rather than description or plot. I can usually fix the plotting problem with a little bit of outlining and planning, but description is difficult for me.
I’ve noticed recently that when I go back and edit that often when I find a section with no description and then end up writing paragraphs to fill the void. the problem with overcompensation is that it’s hard to know when you’re exactly on the money and when you should adjust. The only way to get past this is to know your writing. Something I’ve started doing is consciously putting in a little bit of description, just a sentence or two, during my initial writing so that when I do edits I don’t feel like I need to add so much. That makes it a little easier for me to know what else the scene needs and how much I should add. It also prevents me from having to do so many more edits to fix the descriptions that I’ve added.
So that’s how I’ve been dealing with this problem. Now that I’ve moved into the editing phase I’ve become more conscious of the problem and the best ways for me to deal with it. Has anyone else had any issues with overcompensation in their writing? How do you fix it? I’d love to hear about everyone’s experiences with this!