Excessively Excessive

Our culture has a thing for excess. Whether it's super sizing our burgers, or getting a venti coffee, or spending $75 on stuff you don't really need to get free shipping. Too much of a good thing is never a good thing. Here's another illustration. I have to take medication for excess stomach acid. In order to save money, I buy the multi-pack.

Ok, good, smart move. Inside are three bottles:

In each bottle, is 14 (yes, FOURTEEN) pills:

Which means each bottle is less than one fourth filled. That's a lot of empty space (and plastic) to hold so few pills.

So, 42 pills fills my hand this much:

All 42 could fit into one bottle.

So two plastic bottles and a cardboard box were excess.

I've read some books that were as loaded with excess words- verbose dialogue, lengthy backstory, copious details. I won't reveal those books, but you've read them, or have your own list. You roll your eyes, and sigh, and either plow through (I admire you for that), or like me, you toss the book aside because you have better things to do with your time, like read a better book or write your own. And if you write, maybe... you need to look at your own word usage. A cool writer's trick is to either read your story aloud, or have someone else do it. You can also change the font, because this tricks the eye and brain into thinking they don't remember the words coming next, so it's like a new story. Repetitive words will pop out, or you can do a global search. There are programs designed to help check your work, like Online Editor, Text Analyzer, or Sentence Checker. Long sentences (if you run out of breath before you can finish the sentence, then the sentence is excessively long) should pop up too. While Pulitzer Prize winners and mega bestsellers can get away with excessiveness, we, the average writer, can't.

And since writing novels doesn't pay by the word, there's no need to be excessive.

Char