Brevity is not Better

There is a trend I’ve noticed among writers, one that dictates a journalistic approach to writing. To be brief is to be published and accepted; to expound is to be boring and narrow-minded. I heartily disagree.

I read a book some years ago aimed at improving your writing by considering a number of areas, from characters to plot to pacing. The noticeable motif through many chapters was the idea of brevity. Use fewer words; cut, cut, cut. While I agree that there is a point of excess with anything (at some point a sentence must end), excessively diminishing one’s work is an extreme measure.

One of the rules I see is to only use one adjective. In the book of advice, it suggested removing all but one adjective because to do otherwise will trouble readers to remember too many details and eliminate their ability to exercise their imaginations (because you as the writer are forcing them to see things certain ways). This seems like a decent rule when you consider terrible sentences that do use too many adjectives or adverbs. But to follow this rule would mean that Dorothy should not have been following the yellow brick road. Instead, Frank Baum should have chosen the more important of the two modifiers. Perhaps yellow. That way the reader could consider why the path was yellow. Maybe it was sulfuric; maybe it was made of gold (ah, but if that were true, he could have used the word gilded, so that might be a wrong assumption by the reader).

Ridiculous? Yes. Why are we lured into this trend (I’m holding back from a tangent rant on trends)? I think the simple answer is that we believe it enhances our chances of becoming published. Some who frequent this site may have seen my motto that if you write for yourself, don’t be upset when you aren’t published because you’ve already reached your target audience. But to compromise on style for the sole purpose of publication seems like too much of a sacrifice. And so what if 90% (I’m making this figure up) of the current bestsellers are written in this style? Does that mean it’s what readers actually want? Correlations cannot be extrapolated into conclusions.

I’m not saying there isn’t a place for this style of writing or that all writers who use it are evil (in fact, I might employ the technique at points for the sake of a story). My main point is that as writers, we need to write the way we want to write and not abandon all for the sake of remaining “in style” with whatever seems current. My secondary point is that as a reader, I love details. I will personalize enough of the story, but I won’t feel betrayed in having a scene painted for me. The stories that stick with me the most are the ones that rooted me in the world through details. It was more than one pointed adjective at a time that drew me into Tolkien’s world. Think about the stories that you want to return to the most; how were they written?