Overwriting Poetry Fixes: 7 Signs a Judge Sees
A contest judge lists the seven overwriting habits that sink otherwise strong poems, with a concrete fix for each: paired adjectives, explained images, triple endings, and the bodyguard stanza.
The note I leave most often on contest scoresheets is not "develop this." It is "cut this." Last March I scored a forty-line poem about a father teaching his daughter to reverse into a narrow driveway. Inside it lived a brilliant fourteen-line poem, wrapped in twenty-six lines of insulation: adjectives holding hands, images explained twice, an ending that ended three times. Most overwriting poetry fixes are mechanical and fast. The diagnosis is the hard part, because overwriting never feels like a flaw while you are committing it. It feels like generosity. You are giving the reader more. Here are the seven signs I see every single month, and the specific fix for each one.
Sign 1: Your Adjectives Travel in Pairs
"The cold, icy wind." "Her soft, gentle voice." "The dark, black water." When two adjectives do one job, neither of them earned the seat. Paired adjectives are the clearest early symptom of overwriting because they reveal the underlying anxiety: you did not trust the first word, so you sent a chaperone.
The fix has two levels. Level one: keep the stranger adjective and delete the familiar one. "Icy wind" is dead; "cold wind" is at least honest. Level two, which is better: replace the adjective with a noun that carries the quality inside it. Not "the cold, icy wind" but "the wind off the reservoir." A reservoir in winter does more chilling than both adjectives combined, and it puts a real place in the poem for free.
Sign 2: You Explain the Image You Just Made
This one breaks my heart because it always ruins the best moment in the poem. A writer builds something true: "Her apron still hangs on the pantry hook." Then panic sets in, and the next line arrives: "a painful reminder that she is gone forever." The image did the work. The explanation takes the work back.
The fix is brutal and simple: after every image, ask whether the following line restates it in abstract language. If it does, cut the restatement and let the image stand in the silence it created. This is the whole discipline of imagery: the picture is the meaning. A reader who is told what to feel stops feeling it. A reader who is shown the apron supplies the grief personally, which means the grief becomes theirs, which is the entire transaction poetry offers.
Sign 3: The Abstraction Budget Is Blown
Count the abstract nouns in your draft: love, loss, grief, hope, memory, pain, longing, soul, heart, time. Poems I score often carry eight or nine. Strong poems usually carry one, sometimes zero. Overwriting is not only too many words; it is too many words of the wrong altitude, hovering above the poem instead of standing inside it.
The fix: give yourself an abstraction budget of one per poem. Spend it late, spend it once, or do not spend it at all. Every other abstraction must be traded down for a thing: not "grief," but the two coffee mugs you still set out. If your whole poem orbits a single large feeling, the theme pages are worth a wander; the entries on grief in poetry show how many concrete doors lead into one abstract room.
Sign 4: Your Best Stanza Has a Bodyguard
Here is the sign almost nobody catches alone. Find the strongest image in your poem. Now look immediately before and after it. In overwritten drafts, the best image is flanked by two weaker restatements of the same idea, standing guard. The writer sensed the moment mattered and unconsciously built scaffolding around it. The scaffolding hides the building.
Watch it happen. Before:
My mother's hands were maps of everywhere she worked,
lined and worn from years of endless labor,
creased like roads that led to all her sacrifices,
a lifetime written into weathered skin.
Four lines, one idea, each line diluting the last. After:
My mother's hands were maps.
I traced the flour roads, the bleach-white county lines.
The fix: identify your best line, then delete its neighbors on a trial basis. Read the poem without them. In my experience scoring, the poem survives the surgery about nine times out of ten, and it walks out taller.
Sign 5: The Throat-Clearing Opening
Overwritten poems begin before they begin. "Sometimes, when I sit and think about the past, I find myself remembering..." That is not a poem starting; that is a poet stretching. Readers, and judges especially, can feel the difference between a first line and a warm-up lap.
The fix is the oldest one in the workshop and it still works: cover your first stanza with your hand and read the poem from stanza two. If nothing essential is lost, the poem starts at stanza two. In the contest entries I score, roughly a third would improve instantly with this single cut. The driving poem I mentioned earlier began at line nine, with the daughter's foot trembling over the brake. Everything before that was the poet backing slowly out of their own driveway.
Sign 6: Thesaurus Voice
You know these words the moment you see them, because nobody has said them aloud since 1911:
- azure, crimson, alabaster
- orbs (for eyes), tresses (for hair), visage (for face)
- myriad, plethora, ephemeral
- whilst, amidst, upon (three per stanza)
Thesaurus voice is overwriting at the level of the single word: the plain word felt too small, so it got promoted past its competence. The problem is not that these words are fancy. It is that they are secondhand. They arrive pre-worn, carrying no fingerprints of yours.
The fix: read the line aloud and ask whether you would say it to a friend at eleven at night. Not write it. Say it. "Her azure orbs glistened" fails the test. "Her eyes went glassy" passes. Plain words placed precisely will beat ornate words placed hopefully in every contest I have ever judged.
Sign 7: The Ending That Keeps Ending
Overwritten poems close like a guest who announces they are leaving, then talks in the doorway for ten minutes. There is the image that should end the poem. Then a line explaining the image. Then a final line zooming out to The Meaning Of It All. Three endings, and each one weakens the others.
The fix: find the last image in the poem, the last thing a reader can see or hear, and make it the last line. End on the thing, not on the thought about the thing. If your current final line contains the words "realize," "forever," "finally understand," or "all along," the true ending is almost certainly a line or three above it, waiting.
Overwriting Poetry Fixes You Can Run Tonight
Here is the full sequence as a single working checklist. One draft, seven passes, maybe forty minutes.
- Circle every adjective pair. Keep the stranger, cut the chaperone, or swap both for a concrete noun.
- After each image, delete any line that explains it. Read the gap. Trust it.
- Count your abstract nouns. Budget: one. Trade the rest for objects.
- Find your best line and remove its bodyguards for one read-through.
- Cover stanza one. If the poem survives, it was never stanza one.
- Speak every line aloud. Any word you would not say to a friend gets demoted.
- Locate the final image and end there. Cut everything after it.
Overwriting is not a surplus of words. It is a shortage of trust.
That is the sentence I want you to keep. Every one of these seven signs is the same failure wearing different clothes: the writer did not believe the reader would get it, so they said it again, louder, with more adjectives. There are more cutting techniques in our writing tips library, but the trust problem is the root, and only practice fixes roots.
The Part Where I Admit Something
I overwrite. Every poet I respect overwrites. The first draft is supposed to be too much; that is the draft's job, to bring back everything from the site of the feeling, mud included. The difference between poets who place in contests and poets who almost place is rarely talent. It is that the first group runs the seven passes and the second group hits submit at midnight on a warm draft.
When I score for Writory each month, structure and language are two of the five criteria on every scoresheet, and overwriting is the single most common reason those two numbers come back lower than the poet expected. If you want a blunt reading of where your own drafts stand, enter a poem and study the breakdown when results land on the 30th. Then take the same poem, run the checklist above, and compare the two versions side by side.
The fourteen-line poem inside your forty-line draft is already written. You wrote it. Tonight, with a pencil and forty minutes, you get to find it.
By Team Writory, for Writory.
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