Don't overdecorate your sentences. Please.

It's Friday night and finally I shut my laptop with the slow hinge movement of someone lowering a coffin lid—still committed to the ceremony, just no longer convinced anyone is watching.

RIGHT THERE. That sentence right there—that's overdecoration. That's what writers do when they're trying to sound like they belong in the craft.

Ahem… Welcome to my TedTalk!

Okay, so I've been reading a lot of manuscripts lately and I'm seeing the same thing over and over. Writers will take the simplest action and dress it up in so much language that you have to squint to see what actually happened. A pen rolls off a table and suddenly it's "the pen cascaded across the mahogany surface, its metallic tip singing against the wood before surrendering to gravity's persistent call." It's a pen. It fell. But writers are convinced that simple means boring, so they reach for the biggest words they can find to prove they belong here. They wrap everything in velvet rope, as if the action itself isn't enough.

I read one where a character's father's watch sat in a drawer "like a question that had been asked too many times to still expect an answer." And honestly, what does that even mean? A watch is not a question. A drawer is not tired. The writer was just trying to sound literary and instead it sounds like they were playing Mad Libs with a thesaurus.

Then there's the rain. Oh God, the rain. (It’s tied with the silence that "meant something.") "The rain didn't just fall; it insisted, drumming against the window with the persistence of someone who knew they were right." The rain has opinions now. The rain is argumentative. The rain is committed to being in this scene. But what if you just let it rain? What if the rain matters because of what happens in it, not because you've given it a personality?

Now, I get it. Writing is creative, and there's a genuine dopamine hit from discovering a clever metaphor or using a word you've never used before. It feels good. It feels literary. But that's what your journal is for. That's what group texts with other writers are for. In a novel, the reader's job is to see the story, not stand around admiring your vocabulary choices. The moment they notice how clever you're being is the moment they're pulled out of the narrative.

Overdecorated sentences are distracting. They make the prose visible when it's supposed to be invisible. And I swear, you can only tell someone "Something had shifted beneath everyone's feet" so many times before they stop believing anything has actually shifted.

A character closes a door. Rain falls. A pen rolls. Not everything needs grand description. Silence doesn’t always have to mean something. Simplicity isn't lazy. It's not amateurish. It's just trust. And readers trust simplicity (more than they trust velvet rope).