Too much of a good thing

I spent the weekend at the Tipp City Mum Festival, my first time there. It's the small town's largest annual event and draws a huge crowd.

At our last weekend event outdoors where we sold books and paintings, my friend and I decided we needed S-shaped hooks to hang our paintings from the frame of the canopy. I informed my husband, a handy type, to ask if he could manufacture some for us. Then came the questions, beginning with "How many do you need?"

"Oh, a dozen should do."

As he sometimes does, my husband over-engineered the hooks. We got J-shaped hooks with long ribbons threaded through a slot at the top of the J. He added snaps for quick and easy attachment so the hooks would dangle from the frame. He did have some good suggestions that worked: a flat hook with the edges burred and the corners rounded so the metal did not have sharp or abrasive edges that would slice through the canvas. But the danging-from-the-ribbon idea went too far. If we hanging the paintings from a frame indoors, then there wouldn't have been an issue. However, with even the slightest breeze, the paintings swung and whirled and crashed against each other like wind chimes, but less musical.

The metal being thin and malleable, I bent the straight end of one hook into a reverse hook to make a clumsy S-shape. I hooked the bent end over the frame and the painting hung as I wanted. It was not quite straight, but that was a compromise I was willing to make. Without the ribbon, the hook performed as I wanted. So, my friend and I bent the rest of the hooks and rehung the paintings.

Here's where the tie-in to writing comes.

When writing fiction, especially fantasy and science fiction, many authors spend a lot of time imagining the worlds in which their characters exist. They feel compelled to describe those worlds in exhaustive detail, because all that work shouldn't go to waste, right? Unfortunately, they include more detail—features, if you will—than the reader wants. Essentially, they over-engineer their stories. That results in the writing failing to do what the author intends, because the reader gets lost in those details and loses interest in the story.

In similar fashion, this over-engineering may be applied to those stories in which the author throws everything but the kitchen sink into the plot. There may be so many twists and turns that the reader loses his or her way, leading the reader to ask what happened or wonder if he or she missed something critical in the previous pages.

Complication or complexity doesn't always serve the project's best interests. Simple is best. Refinements (e.g., the sanded edges and rounded ends on my hooks) add value, but not necessarily complexity (the ribbons and snaps). For all the twists and turns in your plot, it should run like a roller coaster not a series of animal trails through the forest: the reader should be able to follow it without diverging. Sometimes you must sacrifice detail for comprehension and engagement.

Every word counts.

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