The question of whether I am an overwriter or an underwriter has actually turned out to be a vexing one. On the sentence level, I’m an overwriter. I am always having to go back and take out extraneous material–excessive adjectives, repeated information, extraneous phrases (I am addicted to parentheticals, which is fine, but not when you’ve got two or three digressions in a single sentence). But at the paragraph level, I am an underwriter, or at least an on-the-edge-of-not-enough-but-still-just-enough writer. I think about my drafts a lot before I start writing and, by the time a whole thought makes it onto the page, it’s had to go through a rigorous subconscious screening process. Sometimes stuff gets lost in the mental editing process that shouldn’t be. But at the paragraph level, I very rarely get rid of whole ideas or descriptions.
I guess, on the balance, I am probably an underwriter. The first written draft (this doesn’t count the drafts that happen in my head before I put anything on paper) takes forever, but once its done, there’s usually only one major structural overhaul. After that, it’s all about paring down my verbose sentences and tweaking the word choices (the synonym feature on word is one of my favorite things, right up there with chocolate). I can’t seem to just write down any old thing and sort it out later. I guess I’m too distractable, too easily lured off-topic by a bright, shiny digression, to deal with more material than I need. I even prefer Chicago citation to MLA because the sight of the parenthesis and another writer’s name is often too much for me. Suddenly I’m thinking about everything so-and-so said in that article and not what that article is doing in my writing.
