Overwriting = Too Many Notes

I have been thinking again about the criticism of overwriting that is so rampant in contemporary literary criticism and just how vacuous and flippant this criticism actually is in most cases. If I were to apply the average critic's disparagement of overwriting to some some classic novels, nearly all of them would be deemed overwritten:

• Anything and everything by Dostoevsky, especially Crime and Punishment and The Brothers Karamozov
• Ditto for Dickens, especially Bleak House and David Copperfield
• War and Peace, Anna Karenina
• Middlemarch
• East of Eden
• Everything from Balzac, for sure
• Same goes for Stendhal, particularly The Charterhouse of Parma
• D.H. Lawrence's novels
• Perhaps even Tolkien's books

The next time you encounter the overwriting criticism, consider the brief list above and the countless other classics that would also be stamped as being severely overwritten, and take the criticism with a giant grain of salt.

Or better yet, remember Mozart whose music was often criticized for being "overstuffed." The film Amadeus did a wonderful job capturing the essence of this criticism through the Emperor's casual "too many notes" barb. 

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