So, I think your message has two contradictory parts:
Write from your own experience, in your personal voice, and so on
Write like this! Remove X, remove Y, etc
This took me a while to realize, but (1) is the more valuable advice. Different people’s personalities are tuned to different ways of writing, and any trick you learned elsewhere and try to layer “on top” (yes, even brevity) can get in the way. The goal of writing is partly to discover how you write. Not how you write at current skill level—that probably just sucks—but something more like an idealization of how you read.
There was some book that a friend once mentioned to me, I don’t know the author or how the book is called, but an anecdote stuck with me. It’s about a guy who’s trying to learn opera singing, and keeps trying to find some imagined teacher, “the man with the voice of a red bull”, a phrase that came to him in a dream. Quite an image for an idealized opera singer, don’t you think? Well, he spends years and never realizes that the thing he was dreaming about was his own voice—in a potential future where he chased the art in exactly the right way.
To me that story sums up what art should be about. You’ve got to have a dream; it has to be your dream, and it will suggest ways to chase it. To some people the dream tells to omit unnecessary words, to Nabokov it suggested something quite different. And to you personally, I guess the question is: are short sentences getting straight to the point really the most enjoyable thing about writing to you? It’s certainly the thing that Paul Graham likes, so more power to him, but you’re allowed to like other things too.
So, I think your message has two contradictory parts:
Write from your own experience, in your personal voice, and so on
Write like this! Remove X, remove Y, etc
This took me a while to realize, but (1) is the more valuable advice. Different people’s personalities are tuned to different ways of writing, and any trick you learned elsewhere and try to layer “on top” (yes, even brevity) can get in the way. The goal of writing is partly to discover how you write. Not how you write at current skill level—that probably just sucks—but something more like an idealization of how you read.
There was some book that a friend once mentioned to me, I don’t know the author or how the book is called, but an anecdote stuck with me. It’s about a guy who’s trying to learn opera singing, and keeps trying to find some imagined teacher, “the man with the voice of a red bull”, a phrase that came to him in a dream. Quite an image for an idealized opera singer, don’t you think? Well, he spends years and never realizes that the thing he was dreaming about was his own voice—in a potential future where he chased the art in exactly the right way.
To me that story sums up what art should be about. You’ve got to have a dream; it has to be your dream, and it will suggest ways to chase it. To some people the dream tells to omit unnecessary words, to Nabokov it suggested something quite different. And to you personally, I guess the question is: are short sentences getting straight to the point really the most enjoyable thing about writing to you? It’s certainly the thing that Paul Graham likes, so more power to him, but you’re allowed to like other things too.