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Would you rather eat a cupcake that has too much frosting or no frosting at all? It comes down to personal taste, of course, but the two situations present different problems. If you have too much frosting, you can just wipe half of it off—but then you’ve wasted some ingredients that didn’t have to be used in the first place. With a naked cupcake, you have to make the frosting from scratch, but you can make sure not to whip up a sickening amount. Although you’re unlikely to face this cupcake conundrum anytime soon, you will likely encounter scenes in your stories that need to be shaved down and scenes that need to be built up. Overwritten scenes give us too much frosting in terms of detail and verbiage. Underwritten scenes, with their lack of frosting, don’t expand the details enough for the reader to fully visualize and experience the story. Most writers lean more one way than the other, but sometimes it varies depending on the type of information you’re trying to convey. You might tend to overwrite setting descriptions and underwrite dialogue, or vice versa. The balance might even shift from project to project. The key is being able to identify when you’ve got too little or too much. Overwriting and underwriting can be applied on a sentence level and a plot level. I’m an underwriter in terms of line editing, in that I don’t include enough setting or sensory details in my first drafts. But I’m a massive overwriter when it comes to plot elements and scenes; I usually try to tackle too many subplots and themes within one story. This video will focus on overwriting and underwriting on a sentence level. We’re examining individual cupcakes, not the whole bakery. Taste is subjective, but it’s often easy for readers to identify “bad” or amateurish writing, even if they can’t articulate why it feels half-baked. An author can tell a fascinating and original story, but if the writing fails to captivate, the reader will put the book down. Fixing problems with underwriting and overwriting isn’t about stifling your voice to make you sound prepackaged; it’s about letting readers know they’re in the hands of a capable storyteller. We can get a feel for each extreme by unwrapping some hypothetical examples. Say that a story opens with a scene of a daughter confronting her father about a letter she found. Here’s an underwritten version of that scene: Fiona stormed into the room. Hector looked up at his daughter from his desk. “What’s going on?” he asked. “You never told me about the letter.” He froze. “I…I don’t know about any letter.” “You just don’t want me to be happy! You hate me. You always have, because I’m not your real daughter.” Fiona started crying, and Hector consoled her until the tears had dried. He offered to make her some hot chocolate, but that only seemed to make things worse. He didn’t know what to do. He had lied about...