If you are ever in doubt, write plainly.
Make it so simple and clear, you feel like you are making notes for a three-year-old.
Here is advice from Scott Adams on doing in better.
Derek Sivers had this to say too.
The main reason for simple writing is that you can lose people’s attention by using 15 words, when six will do.
People are drawn to clarity, you see.
Interesting idea about how geography might seep its way into other things, for maybe the desert gave me sparse writing too.
I soon realized I could not write lyrical prose in my fiction, and, after a bit, I ceased to want to. I developed a tiny theory, which is that a writer’s prose should be be congruent with the landscape he is peopling. It made sense that Faulkner, from the deeply forested South, would write a dense and complex prose, whereas, say, Willa Cather, a plains state author, would write more sparely, as, in fact, I do myself. I’m frequently reminded that my way of looking at both life and art results from the fact that I grew up beneath the bounteous skies of the Great Plains. I write plainly and such few flourishes as I attempt are more apt to show up in my nonfiction, not my fiction.
-Larry McMurtry, Literary Life (Amazon)
