Does anyone have or know of any particular authors or books in which the prose is deliberately overwritten in order to create a particular effect, say to add drama, gravitas. The kind of writing where each point is re-enforced and then undescored, as if to lend it a weight, instilling the point, forcing it into the mind of the reader?

As I'm looking to achieve the effect of the MC going over the same event, the same thought, the same action so many times that in his own mind at least he has rendered every detail, every nuance and shade, every pixel and point. I guess the cinematic equivalent would be those overlayed montages of scenes, of objects, of lines of dialogue played over and over again in different ways. Would the reader perhaps find this kind of thing annoying, distracting, irritating? If so does anyone have any ideas of how I could go about achieving this without overwriting?

Repetition of certain scenes in slightly different ways has already been used and I don't want to overuse that particular technique.

Suggestions, ideas, thoughts?

Anything by Charles Dickens. He published his books in installments, so had a certain work count to meet, which some believe is the reason he was so verbose and came up with the saying that "Dickens was paid by the word."

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work count? I quite like that :)

This is probably off the wall, but how about beginning each chapter with a short section (maybe in italics) of the thoughts of your character 'attacking' the experience from a different angle? Keeping it short and sharp - so that the reader keeps getting reminded of what's going on in the MC's head?
Susiex

How about Silk by Alessandro Baricco (sp?) Endless repetitions.

And the rhetoric In Hard Times - from Gradgrind to Stephen they all emphasise through repetition.

Something very different that springs to mind is the margin notes in Generation X by Douglas Coupland - definitions of Mcjob etc. that reinforces the whole culture he's exploring without the prose itself getting boggy.

C

The kind of writing where each point is re-enforced and then undescored, as if to lend it a weight, instilling the point, forcing it into the mind of the reader?

That sounds like a working definition of Henry James's style of writing to me.

I remember a rather heated debate on another forum about John Banville's Booker winner 'The Sea.' Some people thought it overwritten and pretentious, but it was a first person narrative and the MC was someone who would naturally overwrite and was a bit pretentious - so I thought the voice was spot on. It might be worth a read.

I know what you mean about Henry James, RJH, although the name that immediately sprung into my mind was Ian McEwan!

John Banville's Booker winner 'The Sea.'

I was thinking of that very book just as I hit the link. Also, The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro. That goes on and on and on.

The Remains of the Day goes on and on? Don't agree. It's only around 240 pages - spaced-out Faber pages at that - & certainly not overwritten. It's beautifully underwritten, I'd say.

I see the point about Ian McEwan. He's basically a brilliant short story writer, excellent at portraying single shattering incidents & their effects, who has to pad his stuff out to reach novel length. That said, he did the job very well in Atonement.

You don't think he labours the point about the importance of being a butler? I suppose it's important to some but I found it duller than a day in dull land

Yes, but I think he labours it to stress the point that the butler has repressed almost every aspect of his life apart from being a butler & that he's so immersed in the minutae of buttling that he fails to see the wider picture - i.e. that his co-worker is in love with him & his employer is flirting with Fascism. The power of the book is in what escapes the butler's understanding until it's too late.

Thanks for the ideas.

I don't think Remains of the Day is overwritten, it's just suffering from being written by Kazuo Ishiguro. He takes the smallest point, the most trivial aspect and drags it through 200+ pages. Just look at Never Let Me Go, it's not overwritten by any means it's just the same dull prose repeated over and over again, trying to turn the mundane into something significant and somehow succeeding in making it duller than mundane.

Oh, I love Remains of the Day.
repetition is often used in poetry to good effect, you could look at some modern pantoums, for example.

His novel about the Japanese family - "An Artist of the Floating World" - is superb. Brilliant writing, very understated in many scenes, but that's precisely what makes those scenes, and the body language within them, so powerful.

RJH - I love the bit about McEwan being a great short story writer...probably some truth in that, although I think he'll go down as one of the most influential English novelists of our time. I wonder whether shorter novels are a sign of the times ie so many things competing for our attention, people just don't have time to finish a long novel!

I wonder whether shorter novels are a sign of the times ie so many things competing for our attention, people just don't have time to finish a long novel!

And yet on the whole the further you go towards the commercial end of the spectrum, until you get to category fiction, the fatter the novels...

Emma